Ye Olde Tyme Disk Prices

I dug into the archives and started reading the ads from a 1981 issue of Byte Magazine. My gosh, how in the world did we ever find the money to buy any of this marginally useful stuff? At this point in time I was on my second computer and about to do my first build from scratch using chips, wires, wirewrap boards, and discreet components — releasing much magic blue smoke during that learning curve.

You could buy one of them there new-fangled 5MB (yes, megabyte) hard drives for just $2995! For those who wanted so much storage that no one could possibly fill it, you could get up to 100MB of HD storage for only $19,980. These come with data transfer rate of between 590 kB/s and 900 kB/s. By comparison, you can now get a Seagate 4TB hard drive (that’s ~4,000,000 MB) with 146 MB/s (~146,000 kB/s) average throughput, for $209.

If you didn’t have that kind of cash, you could snag an 8″ double-density floppy drive (about 500 kB formatted) for just $425 – box of 10 disks only $24. A bargain!