Browse Links

Chevy's 1987 MS-DOS 'Build And Price' Program Was Totally Rad

Technology 0 Comments 07/13/2020

https://jalopnik.com/chevys-1987-ms-dos-build-and-price-program-was-totally-1844314157

Posted By: Bradley Stone (UncleBrad)

If you go to pretty much any car company’s website in 2020, you’ll find a “build-and-price” page where you can pick colors and options for any model, see how specs look and get an MSRP. That’s been around for ages, but you might not have seen an older example of a digital car configurator than this incredible “Chevtech Disk Drive” MS-DOS program from the ’80s.

Somebody named Reid H. dropped this into the Oppositelock Facebook Group the other day and I lost my sh*t looking at it. YouTuber LGR Blerbs doesn’t seem to be deeply familiar with car history, but, they obviously know a lot about making old computers work and I’m so glad they were able to power up this old Chevy PR disk and walk us through it in the video embedded above.

Simply put: It’s exactly like the build-and-price web pages of today, just with far inferior graphics, as was the standard 30-plus years ago. After a little eight-bit intro music, you select which model you want to mess with, then select which options you want to get a tabulated list price.

It’s pretty similar to the Buick disk from 1986 that my friend and colleague Jason Torchinsky discovered off earlier this year.