Celebrating 30 Years of Alza: A Look Back at Early Computer Prices and Tech Evolution

In November, it will be 30 years since Alza (previously Alzasoft) was founded, and the company is already slowly preparing for the jubilee celebration. In the archive, she found an old price list of one of the first computers she was collecting at the time. At the beginning of 1997, even the most lowend cost more than 18,000 without an operating system, while the average salary was 10,691 crowns.

The article was published on the website Živě.cz.

Alza then, as it is now, customized computers. The cheapest ever for 18,240 crowns ran on an AMD K5 75 MHz processor, had 8 MB of RAM, an 850 MB disk, a floppy drive and a 2D S3 Trio64V + graphics card. Alza gathered all this in a small tower and provided a 14 “CRT monitor with a resolution of 800 × 600 px, a keyboard and a mouse.

You could buy more memory, a bigger disk, a 15″ monitor, 3D graphics or a faster processor, then up to a Pentium 200. At that time, motherboards used the Socket 7 platform and could for you to install not only chips from Intel and AMD. , but also IBM / Cyrix, IDT WinChip or Rise mP6, but at the same time Intel also had a server and HPC Socket 8 for its better Pentium Pro and Pentium II Overdrive processors.