I love this kind of stuff.
It gets worse, imagine what those dollars could buy today.
Weren’t cd players like 1000 bucks back then too? The 80’s were crazy, I can’t believe things were that expensive.
I remember buying our first VCR, and we paid around $300 (maybe more…it was a lot) for a model that wasn’t even that great. Now, you can get one for $50…or better yet, a DVD player for that much. I think we paid $30 for ours. Crazy.
Sometime around '92 or '93, I bought a 500MB external HD for my Mac, and it was $500. At that rate, the drive in my iMac would be $320,000!
Reg
A friend of mine volunteers for a computer museum. At home, he runs a Mac classic (circa the 1984 commercial) and some other old machines. My friend thinks that using an old machine is cool, like driving a vintage car.
Me, I’m not so nostalgic, though I do tend to favor some old fashioned things like clothes.
I paid almost 2grand for a big ol grayscale Radius monitor. Unbelievable now to contemplate since color is so cheap.
I just looked on the old Christmas catalog site peeplj posted a few days ago-
from the 1983 Sears Wishbook-
Great stuff
I love the VCR blurb; ‘Did that half back really step out of bounds?..freeze the action with stop motion and see for yourself’
And this beauty; ‘The remote control lets you do this up to 20 feet away’ this limit is in place as the cable on the remote is only 20 feet long.
You also get, wait for it…a ‘convenient clock’, why, do other models have an inconvenient clock?
Enter stage right; Al Gore spruiking his new project ‘An Inconvenient Clock’.
As I recall, the first VCR’s made had to have a cloth/tea towel or something similar hung over the front of the timer/clock window panel on the front of the machine because the display was so bright in a darkened room! Ah…memories.
I wonder if convenient meant the same thing back then as it does now? Either way, these clocks have never been convenient, at least to set.
With inflation, you can double all of those prices, double wow.
I will say one thing, I have never had a VCR quit working in under a year, maybe I was lucky, but the total cost of re-buying the same hardware adds up. I have tape players I purchased in the 80’s that still work, I don’t think I have had a CD player that has lasted over 2 years. Total cost of ownership may level things out.
That’s pretty cool. I figured the hard drives for my desktop, my wife’s laptop, all of our SD chips and our USB sticks come to roughly $310 million bucks.