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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

$100 (base OS + bare bones devtools) + $90 (for having the confort of Macros) + $75 (debuging beyond text output) + $75 (for a proper code formatter) = $340 in 1978.

Which are around $1,628.73 in today's money, plus hardware costs, so no wonder that many of us would just stick with the base install and make do with what was available.

Example, I never had an Assembler for Timex 2068, rather painfully translated opcodes into DATA segments, or used a hexdump editor that appeared in some computer magazine as one of those type-in examples.

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Yes, stuff was ridiculously expensive back then. I was lucky that my dad bought an Apple ][ for home use but none of my friends could afford anything like that. All our software was pirated or we wrote it ourselves. I have fond memories of my youth in the 8 bit era but this is the golden age of home computing, right now, and it keeps getting better.

> my dad bought an Apple ][ for home use but none of my friends could afford anything like that

Apple's pricing hasn't changed that much. ;-)

> Introductory price: US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,530 in 2023)

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II

> I never had an Assembler for Timex 2068

I had never heard of the Timex 2068 before, but apparently it was a variant of the ZX Spectrum. Could it really run CP/M (in addition to BASIC and Spectrum games?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_2068

Basically, dabbling in PCs used to be really expensive relative to today. ((The details matter of course) but basically a PC and software in the early eighties was many thousands of dollars in today's money.

An awful lot of other expenses were a lot cheaper, so computer stuff wasn't quite so extravagant for a working person to splurge on as it might seem. The defining characteristic of early users was curiosity, not wealth.

Depends where you lived. The "other expenses" were mostly housing in expensive areas of the country.

If areas with more expensive housing were less likely to have a PC, that’s not a trend that I ever noticed.

It was expensive if you were at the forefront; but things were changing so fast that if you were willing to be back a few years, or a "unfavored" style, you could get in quite cheap.

That really accelerated around '95 or so with Windows 95 - anything that couldn't run it became almost free overnight.

Sinclair ZX-80 was $625 in today's prices when it was released in 1980. Not too crazy.

EDIT: You could get an assembler/dis-assembler for the ZX-81 for $20 (1982). Also at the time a lot of software was "shared" between enthusiasts.

There were some very clearly hobbyist computers like the Sinclair. Also Commodore 64 that were fairly cheap in the early 80s.

But get into anything like a PC clone--much less anything with a hard drive--and the prices went up fast.

Sure. Until the flood of Taiwanese clones brought the price down the cost of a "proper" IBM-PC was high. I thought we were talking "personal computers" more broadly here though. The IBM-PC was released mid 1981...

There were basically some toys that let you do a bit of BASIC or whatever hooked up to your 13” TV. But S-100 bus, Apple, or PC clones weren’t cheap.

They were general purpose computers. You could do BASIC or machine language and run other software on them. Lots of software developers grew up on those.

Definitely true, especially considering the original Apple II, whose base model came with 4K of RAM and didn't include a floating point BASIC.

Of course the real Apple II competitor from Sinclair was the ZX Spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum

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