went through some long ago packed boxes and found the receipt for a shot gun I bought in 1977 which I still have. also found a few newspapers with some adds on them. tried to straighten them out as good as I could.
. Pretty cool to see how “cheap” houses on the Ft. Lauderdale Intracoastal were when new. And Ford Mustangs. The bosses said they saw stuff like that often. It was new to me-I mostly did new construction. Our newspapers stayed in the truck.
The grocery prices are the most shocking. Several of those items are regular purchases for my family and are 4-5× higher than that now.
I bought a Stevens 12 ga. pump action around that same time frame (1978-79) from J.C. Penny’s. Cost was about $120. I foolishly loaned it to my younger brother who proceeded to “lose it” , in other words pawned it, while working down at Lake Murray. Live and learn.
the one that made me really laugh was the tower of power computer.
40 MB hard drive and 1 MB high speed RAM.
also the printer did a whopping 4 pages a minute.
I remember purchasing 1mb SIMM sticks for $100 each!
High density floppy drives!
I still have a 100bm ZIP drive!
I have one in a [early!] Pentium-powered Laptop…. Blazing Fast!!
It’s got a Docking Station with it. All I have on it is old MegaSquirt stuff.
Over $26K for a 95 Z/28? Vert or not I don’t give a doggone blasted water blocker. This was 95 and you could get 01/02 base Z/28’s for under $22K. You could probably get into a 98+ LS1 Z/28 with the SS package for that kind of $.
Correction:
That car is basically $27K, with an original claimed price of basically $29K. That’s not even a SS. Mustang Cobras costed less, and maybe even as verts. I was 12/13 in 95 so I can’t say for sure, but Cobra’s were sub $30K cars before the 03 year model.
Edit again: not sure there was a 95 Camaro SS. Pretty sure some of the GEN2 LT1 cars were SS’s. Maybe 96/97? You could even get a 97 with a LT4 if I’m not mistaken, but they were kind of rare.
I think the funniest is the $448 laser printer that did 4 pages per minute. And the 3% sales tax. Can’t do that today with big government spending our money all the time.
THIS!!! Over priced to say the least!
The things that you get more of for less money are computers.
I had better luck with printers 20 years ago.
I gave up on buying printers.
I wonder if it could be related to the extra dust, living in a rural area next to a huge forest.
Now I put *.pdf’s on a USB drive & print them at the library.
I hear you. Printers are disposable anymore, the only expensive part is the ink.
However I’ll say this, I only buy laser printers now and they are more reliable and the ink (toner) doesn’t dry up on the print head. Specifically Brother MFC-L3770cdw. I guess at $500 you get what you pay for.
I think part of it is, that we are seduced by the cheap prices.
We expect the $50 printer to last as long as the $1000 printer.
The $50 printer lasts 6 to 9 months.
The $1000 printer lasted a few years.
Not a huge surprise.
Typically the <$400 printer doesn’t last a ream of paper anymore.
You wouldn’t Believe how cheap it is to make those Chinese injection-moulded $50 Printers: There is more Value in the bits of metal and silicon they have to use (axles, screws, IC’s, etc.) to make them function, than there is in the entire rest of the printer.
I used to be a printer service tech for all the major brands. Ink-jet style printers from most manufacturers were considered Loss Leaders - meaning it cost more to make them than they sold for. However, they made up for that “loss” with the ink cartridges. If they could get you to buy 2 factory cartridges (of any color) you were generating profit for them. That wasn’t always true of the high-end printers, like wide format ink jets for drafting. Those type units were built to last, but they were not cheap.
Laser printers are really the only way to go though. Even color lasers are pretty cheap today and will last home users for years.
I believe it.
When I worked in Silicon Valley, though I was always part of the R&D org chart, I usually put my “second desk” on the manufacturing floor.
Or, at least, made it a point to take an hour long 4 PM break with the manufacturing people.
I like, maybe even LOVE, manufacturing.
I did not like to see American manufacturing torn down and sent overseas.
Does anybody know where the USA now buys their 40 foot diameter ship gears ?
I remember getting a tour of the Westinghouse factory in Sunnyvale, where Condo’s now sit.
They were machining 40 foot diameter gears for Navy ships.
I read that a lot of that work is now done in South Korea.
