The following adverstisements were scanned directly from the February 1984 issue of Byte Magazine and are presented solely for your entertainment. I have removed the name of the company and any phone numbers, etc. leaving only the product name(s) and price(s). Let's have some fun and be thankful we don't have to re-live those trying times!

Ad number one: The IBM PC

Released in 1981, the IBM PC would literally change the “Home PC” market. Intended as a business-class computer that would be just as comfortable at home, the IBM PC sold in numbers that amazed even IBM. At the time of it's release, the market was flooded with a variety of home computers; Atari, Commodore, Apple, Altair, IMSI, Hewlett Packard, Xerox and many other companies had systems on the market. Not to mention the vast array of S-100 compatible systems, C/PM systems and the horde of Apple clones (Franklin being the most prominent).

Enter, IBM and the world changed. By the close of the decade, IBM and the IBM clones had dominated the marketplace. At one point, Digital Research - the creator of the long-lived Operating System, C/PM (Control Program for Microcomputers) - even attempted to sway IBM PC users away from MS-DOS (MicroSoft Disk Operating System) with full-page ads offering C/PM for free with the purchase of any of their C/PM business programs!

Here's our first ad:

Now, look carefully at the specifications! The first machine includes just 64K of RAM! Today, most computers are sold with at least 1GB of RAM. 64K of RAM is roughly equal to 64,000 characters of memory. 1GB is equal to 1,024K - or over one billion characters of memory! I checked 1984 RAM prices and found 64K to be approximately $45. If RAM still held that value, todays standard 1GB would cost a whopping $754,974,720!

Also notice that there is no hard drive included, only two full-height 5.25” floppies. You also got a monochrome monitor. All of this for the low price of just $2,590! To buy the upgraded model with 256K RAM, one 5.25” full-height floppy and a 10MB (yes, you read that correctly - not 10GB but 10MB) hard drive, you would have to invest nearly $4,000.

Ad Number Two: Printers

My biggest complaint about today's printers would have to be the cost of ink. Sure, you can buy a decent quality ink-jet printer with scanning and faxing capabilities for less than a hundred dollars, but just wait until you have to buy ink! My latest printer, a Lexmark X5470 was less than $80, yet the two ink cartridges cost $40 - half the cost of the entire printer. Does anyone else see a problem here? I've heard the arguments before: I'm not just buying “ink” - I'm buying ink as well as the cartridge, which contains the circuitry and ink-jet heads. I still think that after over twenty years of development and sales, the cost of ink-jet cartridges should have fallen considerably by now. Just look at the above example on computers!

Wow, look at those prices! For a letter-quality daisywheel printer, you'd have to spend at least $1,800. A low-end dot-matrix printer cost $430. And I certainly don't miss the “whap, whap, whap” sound of a daisywheel printer, or the machine-gun retort of the dot-matrix printer!

Okay, maybe I won't complain too much about the cost of ink anymore.

Ad Number Three: Hard Drives

Back in the early nineties, I operated a computer sales and service center. The Seagate ST-225 hard drive was a popular seller. This was a 20MB, 5.25” form factor hard drive. It was very reliable and I installed hundreds of them in new and used PC's. Back then, we used to calculate the cost per megabyte to purchasers. If I could buy an ST-225 for $125, the cost per mega-byte (cpm) would be 9 cents. Today, I can buy a 320GB internal hard drive for about $180. This translates to a cpm of .00005 cents! So, if I had to buy a 320GB hard drive at “yesterday's” prices, it would cost me an incredible $29,491!

Here's a peek at 1984 hard drive and floppy drive prices:

One 5.25” full-height floppy drive cost $239. This was a Control Data or Tandon brand - both considered to be excellent brands.

The truly shocking items are the hard drives. A 20MB hard drive cost a staggering $2,050! That's a cpm of $102.50! One hundred dollars per megabyte! What would a new, 320GB hard drive cost me in 1984 dollars?

Are you sitting down?

$33,587,200

All of this makes me ponder the future. Where are we headed? In twenty-four years, will we look back at 2008 and laugh?

Will we say, “Wow! Can you believe we were paying .00005 cents per megabyte? What a joke!”

Will we be measuring the cpt - cost per terabyte? Will computers as we know them even exist?

I look forward to what the future holds but I do hold a special place in my heart for the early days of personal computers. And while I may not have been able to afford most of the systems and peripherals that were on the market, I made do with what I could afford and took part in the revolution.

Here's to the next twenty-four years!