Do you remember how you used to save your computer data?

Today it is common to save our electronic data in the cloud or on USB drives. We usually do not worry too much about the size of our files. We can always just buy more storage at a low price.

However, back when I first started working with computers in the 1980’s data storage came at a premium price for very little data.

The pictures in this post come from a 1982 Radio Shack catalog.

The cheapest media to use was Computer Cassettes. You could buy a certified tape for only $3.69 or get the cheap ones for only $1.79. You could also buy a cassette recorder for only $59.95.

You could also store your data on diskettes. Do any of you remember the big 8″ diskettes?

The big diskettes cost $7.50 apiece and would hold about 500 Kilobytes.

You could get the disk drive for only $600. What a bargain.

The new 5 ¼” diskettes were much cheaper. You could get them for only $4.95 but they only held 360 Kilobytes of data.

The actual drives were about the same price as an 8″ drive, but took up less room on your computer table. Plus, you could have up to four drives attached to your computer.

Today you can buy an 8GB USB Flash Drive for about the same price as an 8″ Diskette.

To see how much a complete computer system would cost back in the early 80’s visit my post 1982 Computer Prices.

Can you imagine paying so much for so little data storage?

Steven