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Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

If you're into the ads, Jason Scott has a project going to scan all the old Computer Shopper magazines. I haven't looked to see exactly where things stand with that.

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543

I recently started looking at ads in the old Byte magazines and among the things I was reminded of was how long the Z80 held on among the Byte crowd. And how much money (more apparent if you adjust for inflation) hobbyists and aspiring professionals were willing to spend on their hardware and software toys in the eighties. Having grown up in that time makes things like (a timely example) some people whinging about the cost of a Raspberry Pi 5 feel so irritating and inexplicable.

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There was a much smaller difference between high and median incomes in the early 80s, so the original Mac would have been around 1 month's salary - not trivial, but not an impossible reach for many people.

Lisa was far out of that bracket. But business S-100 systems had been selling for $2k to $20k and up since the 70s, so $10k for Lisa's advanced features would have seemed realistic.

Today most people are paying far more in student debt, health insurance, and housing costs. So although nominal income is three times higher, free disposable income hasn't kept pace.

It's true that hardware today is commoditised and much, much cheaper. But at the low end, those old II/Mac systems were still more affordable to middle class families than a straight inflation conversion suggests.

One months salary is still an awful lot for something that no middle class family ever needed. If the goal is educational and/or recreational (games), then a 6502 machine could be had at a fraction of the cost and with a community. In the UK, the Macintosh basically didn't exist as far as I remember, my first 68000 machine was an Atari ST in 1986/7, still a fraction of the price of a Mac. I didn't see a Mac until the early nineties and it was by then nothing new or interesting (the OS was already considered technically obsolete).

Yep, same here in Canada. My mother was a teacher and my father a sometimes-unemployed machinist, so on the upper side of working class, really, and big exciting family expenditures in the early & mid 80s were things like a microwave or a dishwasher which we could afford maybe once a year at tax return time. It was a big expenditure for them to get me the VIC-20, which I ran off an older B&W 9" TV. Saved my own allowance money & money from bottle recycle returns to get a used Atari 520ST in 1987.

They had a single Macintosh at the school, which I sometimes got to play with. Even the Apple II was priced out of the "home" market possibilities. Family friends had one, but it was like a luxury product like their hi-fi system or boats.

Maybe the US was a different story. But here a Mac was way out of the reach out of people on a typical income.

Also people didn't typically take on debt like they do now. Interest rates were double-digits.

There was a recent post about restoring a different Motorola 68k machine, an early 80's $25,000 HP Series 200 9836C.

https://hackaday.com/2023/06/20/repairing-a-25000-hp-worksta...

People forget how ruinously expensive RAM was in the early 80's, and that HP machine had a very large amount for the time.

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