Do you remember how expensive computers used to be? Do you remember what you got for that high price?

Today we complain about how expensive our smart phones, tablets, laptops and desktops are. We can get one of each for much less than the price of a hard drive from the early 80’s.

Tonight while looking for something else I ran across a Radio Shack computer catalog from 1982. Wow, you will be amazed at the blazing computing power that you got for the price.

How about a disk drive for a TRS-80 Color Computer? The drives used 5¼” mini floppy disks. Did you see the word mini? Of course they were mini compared to the older 8″ drives.

A capacity of 156K and the drives only weighed 8.4 pounds!

Oh, and those mini diskettes? They cost five bucks apiece.

You could add up to four drives to your TRS-80 Color Computer. The first drive complete with Controller and Cable would set you back $599.00, but additional drives only cost $399.00.

Altogether for about $1,800 you could save half as much as what fits on what most of us remember as a floppy disk.

A disk drive actually cost more than the TRS-80 computer. The computer, without a monitor only cost $399.00 and you got 4K of RAM.

Of course there was a cheaper option for data storage. You could buy a cassette recorder for only $59.95.

Did you need more storage? How about a Hard Disk?

This was a great bargain. You got 8 MB of storage for only $4,495.00.

Did you need to store more data? Luckily additional hard drives only cost $3,495.00. You could then store up to 32 MB of data for only $15,000.

Of course to use the Hard Disk you would also need a TRS-80 Model II computer for your business.

For only $10,811.00 you could get the computer, hard drive, printer and a printer cable. Oh, wait you also get the printer stand and the desk.

What a bargain!!!

With inflation you are looking at 2014 prices of more than $25,000 for the computer system.

For a look at calculators from about the same period click on: Calculators

Luckily they were a bit cheaper.

Would you trade your smart phone for one of these computer systems?

Steven