I went to my local grocery store the other day and I saw something that I’ve never seen before: there were Nintendo Wiis in the display case. Almost two years after launch, I’ve finally seen a Nintendo Wii on a store shelf. And not just one, but nine of them! And get this: when I went back the next day, they were all still there. Is it possible that supply has finally caught up with demand? Spooky.
We knew that there was supply because the Wii is currently outselling the PS3 and Xbox 360 combined, and yet the demand was obviously still greater than the supply because they simply couldn’t be found on store shelves. It’s quite something to be #1 by a large margin, and still be completely sold out of product. Demand may yet exceed supply again by Christmas, making the Wii impossible to find for a third Christmas in a row, but, for the first time ever, it’s possible to just walk into a store and buy a Wii. If you’re planning on buying one for Christmas, play it safe and buy one now.
Also, I made some phone calls today and got three more games liberated. I’ll update their status on the site once the authors send the files and licenses to my email. The formal announcement is expected on Tuesday.
I’ve spent almost no money this year as a result of unanticipated unemployment, but a local gentleman was selling some irreplaceable pieces of computer history recently, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add them to my little archival museum.
He was selling an original IBM PC (the model 5150)! This is the first ever PC, the computer that all modern PCs are based on. It featured an Intel 8088 processor clocked at 4.77 MHz, a copy of BASIC written into ROM, a green monochrome monitor, two 5.25″ floppy drives, and no hard drive. Here it is.
It still works, and it was $120. I call that a great deal! I also purchased an Apple Macintosh 512K for $60. It has a built-in white monochrome monitor, a 3.5″ floppy drive, a mouse(!), and no hard drive. It features a Motorola 68000 processor clocked at 8 MHz, and was the second ever Macintosh computer, after the original Macintosh 128K. This baby came packed with 512K of RAM, hence the name. It was $60, another great deal.
He was such a nice guy that he threw in an old 8″ floppy disk for free. This one appears to be double sided, double density, meaning that it stored 980 KB when formatted with CP/M, and a whopping 1.2 MB when formatted with MS-DOS! That density debuted in 1977, the year before 360 KB 5.25″ floppy disks came out and took over the market. 1.2 MB 5.25″ floppy disks were introduced in 1982. How amazing is it that this ancient floppy disk format had the same capacity as the largest-ever 5.25″ floppy disks, and essentially the same capacity as the 3.5″ floppy disks that we still use today?
Anyway, check out my 8 inch floppy disk. Isn’t it shiny?
This thing is almost as big as the entire Macintosh 512K! You really couldn’t have put an 8″ floppy drive in one of these things.
I also bought four loose 8086 processors and 8088 processors, which is kind of neat. There was also a bunch of add-in cards for the Macintosh, including a card that had a Z80 processor that allowed you to run a copy of CP/M on a Mac. How cool is that?
Finally, I purchased a whole bunch of software over the weekend that I’m going to be reviewing soon. It will be fun.