Blast from the Past: Dateline October 1984

[Speck Tater]

I just stumbled onto a copy of "Computer Shopper" dated October 1984. Here are some of the amazing bargains that could be had back in the good old days:

10 Megabyte (not gigabyte) hard drive $1150.00 to $1295.00
72 Megabyte disk drive $4699.00
Hayes 300 baud modem $219.00
256K (not MB) RAM memory $365.00
Epson dot matrix printer (A blazing 60 characters per second) $1295.00 (printer ribbons $9.80 each)
13-inch Color monitor 720x440 resolution $795.00
Two button mouse for PC $129.95
Motherboard - 5Mhz (not GHz) with 512K RAM $1099.00
Complete PC clone system 256K 10MB hard drive 4Mhz speed including DOS $2795.00
Genuine IBM PC with 10 MB hard drive and 256K $4995.00
Single 8K (not meg) RAM chips $35.97 each
20 MB networked disk drive with file server $7895.00

What ever happened to the great bargains like this?

[Igel]

1. Ah, the good old days.

I remember them well. Our office went completely computerized ... and the bookkeeper kept two sets of books for a few years, just to check up on the computer. Wordstar.

It was a pain in the arse when the hard card died with no warning. Well, ok, it gave plenty of warning, but who knew they were warnings?

[WinterStorm]

2. How much was software?

[Speck Tater]

3. What little software there was

wsa about the same price range as today. Basically anything from $20 to $200 depending on what it was.