The Bottom Line (Apple II)

https://megalextoria.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-bottom-line-apple-ii.html

This particular ad is from the premiere issue of inCider from January 1983. inCider was a magazine dedicated to the Apple II line of computers. Back in the day, there were tons of computer mail order places advertised in computer magazines. "The Bottom Line" is not one I recognize but this is a few years before I got my first computer and obviously in this ad they are pushing Apple II related items.

The price for the Apple compatible Franklin Ace 1000 was $1549. That includes a disk drive and amber monitor. That sounds like a lot but it's a bargain compared to the price of real Apple equipment at the time. But who wants an amber monitor?

It's amazing how much a dot matrix printer cost. The Star Micronics Gemini-10, quite a popular printer at the time, was $419.88 in 1983. That number already sounds expensive but adjusted for inflation, that would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,300 today.

Modems weren't much better. An abysmally slow 300 Baud modem was $239. A more respectable 1200bps would cost you $569.

But for a real demonstration of just how far prices for technology have fallen, take a look at the hard drive prices. A whopping 5 MB would cost you at least $2000. That's more like $5,400 in today's dollars.