[rescue] Wanted - 3B2

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: wa2egp at att.net
>Date: 2008/07/07 Mon PM 10:50:11 EDT
>To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [rescue] Wanted - 3B2

<snip>

>I remember now.  Probably the beefier power supply was for the power those full height drives would pull.  Actually, I was toying with the idea of putting in two 3.5 drives in place of the 5.25 drive.  I would fit if I swung the drives sideways.  Too bad they didn't go one more version of that machine.  The next one would have been color.

Odd memories:

There was a mail-order house that had the AT&T 7300 and the Smart Suite of integrated software for sale, around $700 IIRC. It was very odd to see this "geeky" item in a mass-market mailer.

A year or two before I laid hands on a AT&T PC7300 (3B1) I remember reading about a single board computer that was rumoured to be coming soon, that had an on-board 68000-family CPU, RAM, serial ports and mass storage connectivity, along with a *nix-like OS for $695 - an amazing price at the time, but it never materialized. I remember thinking the 3B1 was a better deal at half the price, and as a complete system.

The PC7300 was the last machine I had that had upgradeable RAM by plugging actual memory chips in a socket on an add-in board...

Over the course of a year or two, I peaked at 4 or 5 3B1s, eventually selling/giving away all the systems save one, which I parted out and sold the parts for more than I was getting for entire systems.

End of an era, as far as I'm concerned...

Lionel