Selling a Computer

CIS 1055 is mercifully ending and today groups had to pitch sales to get people to buy specific computer configurations based on pre-defined criteria.  After hearing the following
Picasa pronounced “piss-casa (Spanish for urine house)”, protege pronounced as “poor-teej” and people talking about bigger megahertz and one group actually using the word “interweb” I did my presentation.  My client needed something portable that he could do office functions on that would be able to take numerous plane trips.  I sold them a GRiD Compass from 1982.  I highlighted it’s portability as it weighed a mere 11 lbs, had a whopping 384 k of RAM, a high res 320 x 200 CGA monitor which displayed a stunning 16 colors and the optional 1200 baud modem was fast enough to see the text race across the screen.

I pointed out how it interfaced well with their TRS-80 at home and absolutely smoked the Altair 8800 in benchmarks.  Also, as an added bonus the Ni-Cad batteries were much safer than the exploding lithium-ion batteries of today.  Finally, it’s ruggedness was proven by it having flown on the Space Shuttle Discovery.  All this for less than $10,000.  I can’t wait to see how the class voted.

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