+Lathe26 Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 Looks like Sears was offering the ECS 16KB RAM Expander for sale back in their 1983 Wishbook catalog. Of course, there is no photo of the item. They just talk about it, gave it a catalog order number, and were asking $79.99 for it. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+intvsteve Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 This is awesome! Now I need to find some time to see if I can fill in some holes on the Sears part numbers at the website. I remember writing down that stuff on a list, as well as a small color TV for my room and figuring out how many hours I'd need to work to save up enough money for all of that. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bikeguychicago Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 (edited) And here I thought you had one that made it out of the labs for sale... Edited January 11, 2018 by bikeguychicago Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freewheel Posted January 12, 2018 Share Posted January 12, 2018 You jackass. I thought someone found one and was selling one. I mean, not that it's particularly useful, as the ECS is one of the worst computers of its era, but still... LOL @ RAM costing almost as much as the entire computer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+nurmix Posted January 12, 2018 Share Posted January 12, 2018 Nice find. Somewhere I have a promotional pic showing the memory expansion module - probably posted here somewhere. I'm thinking it was a block of painted wood like the Inty II Intellivoice. Sent from my Keyboard Component using Jack's Conversational Intelli-talk cassette Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mthompson Posted January 12, 2018 Share Posted January 12, 2018 Nice find. Somewhere I have a promotional pic showing the memory expansion module - probably posted here somewhere. I'm thinking it was a block of painted wood like the Inty II Intellivoice. I found it near the back of the 1983 Mattel catalog. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Lathe26 Posted January 12, 2018 Author Share Posted January 12, 2018 And here I thought you had one that made it out of the labs for sale... You jackass. I thought someone found one and was selling one. I mean, not that it's particularly useful, as the ECS is one of the worst computers of its era, but still... LOL @ RAM costing almost as much as the entire computer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAMes-H21pc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mr_me Posted January 12, 2018 Share Posted January 12, 2018 ... LOL @ RAM costing almost as much as the entire computer. $80 was a fair price for 16kB of sram. The computer is in the Intellivision so it costs $200 without the 16kB expansion. You could buy a 16kB Timex Sinclair for $80 at the time. The music synthesizer at $100 seems expensive; it doesn't even have the synthesizer chips. There's no ecs software in the catalog; no world series baseball or mind strike. There's no tron solar sailer or treasure of tarmin either. They do have Locomotion rather than happy trails. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freewheel Posted January 12, 2018 Share Posted January 12, 2018 $80 was a fair price for 16kB of sram. In the very same Wishbook you could buy a 16KB TI-99/4A for $99. The entire computer, including the RAM, was only $20 more than the INTV RAM alone. 64KB computers were $250 at that point. An INTV+ECS+16KB RAM was $280. Not exactly a good deal for 1/4 of the computer (RAM-wise... in other areas I'm being generous by only going that low). Hell, you could get a 48KB Sinclair for $180 - although the only advantage that had was RAM; graphically it was dogpoo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mr_me Posted January 12, 2018 Share Posted January 12, 2018 (edited) Dram was coming down in price faster than sram, and I might be wrong but the ecs wasn't designed to take dram. It didn't matter, the Intellivision was already obsolete by end of 1982. TI-99 is a bad example, they were in a price war with commodore and were selling the ti-99/4a at a loss. Edited January 12, 2018 by mr_me Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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