Home› PC & Mac Hardware and Software
Click here to check out Digital Spy's Tech section for the latest news, updates, reviews and cheap deals.
Options

Blast from the past, best buy prices from 1996!

Comments

  • Options
    rottweilerrottweiler Posts: 2,569
    Forum Member
    ✭✭✭
    #2
    GB is the new MB
  • Options
    [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 36,630
    Forum Member
    ✭
    #3
    US prices though, not really comparable to the inflated prices we were paying at the time (and still do although to a lesser extent).

    Someone posted links to old Argos catalogues that made even more interesting reading.
  • Options
    pocatellopocatello Posts: 8,813
    Forum Member
    ✭
    #4
    Still, prices are relative, and as such are comparable.

    The modem prices are especially laughable... 159 dollars for that 33.6 speaker phone model...now they are free.

    If you account for inflation, it gets even worse. Googled up a calculator, 159 dollars in 2010 is 218 dollars....
  • Options
    c4rvc4rv Posts: 29,619
    Forum Member
    ✭✭✭
    #5
    Considering its 15 years old I didn't think the pricing was that bad and some of those technologies have only recently become end of life.
  • Options
    zx50zx50 Posts: 91,270
    Forum Member
    ✭✭✭
    #6
    It's unbelievable that $2,400 (about £1,500) got you such a crappy computer back then. Of course, back then it wasn't crappy, it was classed as decent. How far we've come since then.
  • Options
    rottweilerrottweiler Posts: 2,569
    Forum Member
    ✭✭✭
    #7
    what will the next 20 years bring, tech from another world
  • Options
    LostFoolLostFool Posts: 90,659
    Forum Member
    ✭✭✭
    #8
    I bought my first PC in 1992 for £1200 - well other a month's income at the time. That was a 486SX-25 with a 120MB hard disk and (I think) 4MB of RAM. It then cost me something like £200 to upgrade to double the memory.

    I have been recently thinking about upgrading my main home PC but I doubt I will spend more than £500-600 which is now less than a week's income.
  • Options
    LostFoolLostFool Posts: 90,659
    Forum Member
    ✭✭✭
    #9
    <duplicate post>
  • Options
    albertdalbertd Posts: 14,360
    Forum Member
    ✭✭
    #10
    Go back another 15 years to 1981 and you had the ZX81 costing £69.95 (built) with a massive 1kB (yes, 1 kilobyte) of memory and no disks (just an unreliable tape cassette interface). A plug on 16kB RAM pack (again unreliable and difficult to purchase) was £49.99.

    Sounds cheap at today's prices, but this was 30 years ago.
  • Options
    AVTECHAVTECH Posts: 1,399
    Forum Member
    ✭✭✭
    #11
    albertd wrote: »
    Go back another 15 years to 1981 and you had the ZX81 costing £69.95 (built) with a massive 1kB (yes, 1 kilobyte) of memory and no disks (just an unreliable tape cassette interface). A plug on 16kB RAM pack (again unreliable and difficult to purchase) was £49.99.

    Sounds cheap at today's prices, but this was 30 years ago.

    And a till roll style thermal printer that faded away after a couple of days, that cost around £29 and £2 for a replacement silver till roll.
    See it HERE
  • Options
    alias aliasalias alias Posts: 8,824
    Forum Member
    ✭
    #12
    PC Would web site 1997


    Apricot MS540 P133 Multimedia
    133 MHz Intel Pentium processor, 16 Mb EDO RAM, 2.5 Gb hard disk, 14" SVGA monitor,
    Eight speed CD-ROM, stereo soundcard & speakers, Fax modem, Windows 95
    New ex VAT �701.28 inc VAT

    http://web.archive.org/web/19970417034546/http://www.pcworld.co.uk/
  • Options
    albertdalbertd Posts: 14,360
    Forum Member
    ✭✭
    #13
    AVTECH wrote: »
    And a till roll style thermal printer that faded away after a couple of days, that cost around £29 and £2 for a replacement silver till roll.
    And didn't they pong when they were running!
    Actually the print on ours didn't fade. My Dad did some labels with it once and they were still clear over 10 years later,
  • Options
    cnbcwatchercnbcwatcher Posts: 56,681
    Forum Member
    ✭
    #14
    Wow I can't believe a PowerPC Mac (possibly a Performa) sold for $2399 back then! Now that would probably get you an 8-core Mac Pro or even the top-end 17" MBP! And multimedia was the buzzword back then too. All it means is that a computer can play sound and video. I never hear anyone using the term any more but then I guess it's taken for granted now.
  • Options
    evil cevil c Posts: 7,833
    Forum Member
    ✭
    #15
    I bought my first PC in May 1991 and it was £1300 for an 80-286 20MHz machine with a 40MB hard disk that had accelerator software so it ran at 27MHz. It was supposed to be the fastest that any 286-20 could run. From memory I think it had 2MB RAM and I paid extra for a dedicated 1MB Trident graphics card. The price included a 14 inch interlaced VGA colour monitor with a maximum res of 1024x768. I was the only person I knew who had a PC and everyone thought I was nuts to buy one, even though I thought that one day everyone would have one. At work, the year before that, I was part of a small team that was developing electronic mail and I remember when I was demonstrating the software I was telling clients that the messages arrived after one six hundreth of a second. They found the speed very hard to believe and thought I was making it up!
  • Options
    neo_walesneo_wales Posts: 13,625
    Forum Member
    ✭✭
    #16
    Thinking back I can remember an Amstrad 1512 with a dot matrix printer costing over £1000 and my first Pentium cost well over a grand, CD copier drives for a PC when first launched were £300+, hard drives were about £1 per megabyte and I remember paying £40 per mb for ram. My wife was to say the least under impressed when she found out I'd spent two grand on a system.
Sign In or Register to comment.