Black Friday Print Ads......... in 1996....

[manimal]

good times!


I think I got a 200mhz mac clone on BF that year. Ran Windows on it with virtual PC and I would force quit the OS and it ran PC software faster than any pc made at the time.

 

[dud]

Makes you wonder how ridiculous the 2014 BF ads/prices will appear in 2032 ...

 

[John Connor]

I so wanted a Macintosh back then. Mainly because I was brain washed from using them at school. My first laptop was an old Mac, but it didn't have Internet access. My real laptop was a Dell C600.

My bro bought a N64 from his friend and we played Goldeneye all night and day! Now I play the ROM along with Perfect Dark.

 

[John Connor]

Packard Bell ... haven't seen that name in a long time.

Reminds me when I was copying shit off of the Packard Bells in Walmart and the dumb ass store clerk ran over, ejected my disk and said what are you doing. Idiot.

 

[John Connor]

Packard Bell... lol. They were always crap.

Gateway??? LMAO!

 

[Engineer]

Packard Bell... lol. They were always crap.

There's a reason they were called Packard Smell.

I bought a Packard Bell 486 SX (SUX) from Montgomery Ward around 1991. Now, both are out of business (and both sucked).

 

[bbhaag]

Packard Bell ... haven't seen that name in a long time.

My first PC was a Packard Bell 386SX. It came 4mb of ram was pre installed with MS-DOS 5.0. Good times.

 

[edro]

Gateway??? LMAO!

Gateway 2000 !!!

 

[zerocool84]

Which was rather amazing when you consider how cheap they were to develop.

But but physically making the game wasn't cheap. Cartridges, memory back then weren't cheap.

 

[Train]

That's using overall inflation. Which is heavily inflated due to food and energy.

IIRC, durable goods inflation is much, much smaller over the same time period.

 

[OverVolt]

I remember my parents buying me a Packard Bell from Best Buy in 1996. Everything (including monitor and printer) cost over $2000. God, what a colossal waste of money. Sorry mom and dad.

Welllllllllllllll did you ever get a tech job out of it? It put you in the exclusive 10-30% of people who had a computer/internet back then.

 

[OverVolt]

That's using overall inflation. Which is heavily inflated due to food and energy.

IIRC, durable goods inflation is much, much smaller over the same time period.

It is in fact the opposite. Incomes were around the same back then but a gallon of gas was 97cents and bread was like $1.25. There was way more disposable income. My dad was making $60k/year back then meanwhile a midrange car cost $12k AFAIK.

Statistics never lie but liars use statistics. It would be better to show the data as a percentage of disposable income.

 

[Train]

It is in fact the opposite. Incomes were around the same back then but a gallon of gas was 97cents and bread was like $1.25. There was way more disposable income. My dad was making $60k/year back then meanwhile a midrange car cost $12k AFAIK.

Statistics never lie but liars use statistics. It would be better to show the data as a percentage of disposable income.

Not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me.

Disposable income and cost as a % of income are whole different variables from what I'm getting at, which is just a subset of overall inflation.

 

[Train]

A few images pulled off Bing Image search. Not the exact time frame we are looking for, but does show durable goods (which I am pretty sure video games falls under?) have been mostly deflationary over the past couple decades.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I bought my first HD, 20MB (yes, Megabyte) MFM Seagate for $379.99 in 1988. That's quite a leap in 8 years in both price, size and performance.

I have a 52 MB Quantum SCSI drive that still works believe it or not.

 

[alkemyst]

LOL. I remember standing in line to get a CD Burner one year. Stood there from 4:00am to 6:00am (opening) and the damn store (Best Buy) opened the OUT doors first so all of the people that were in the parking lot ran into the out door while the people who were standing in line were trapped behind the railings.

I haven't been back to a BF since then.

Edit: Wow, $149 for a CD-ROM drive. I was too poor then to buy even that stuff, lol.

My Plextor SCSI readers were brain damage back then...

Imation (Plextor) 8/20
Plextor Plexwriter 12/10/32S
Plextor UltraPlex 40 Wide
Plextor Plexwriter 12/10/32S S
Sanyo BP6
Sanyo CRD-BP4

Then I migrated to EIDE.

 

[mmntech]

Which was rather amazing when you consider how cheap they were to develop.

Cartridges use more expensive components and are more difficult to mass produce. That's a big part of why the PS1 games in there are $10-$15 cheaper. It's easy to see why the N64 struggled. No loading times were nice, but bigger games and better music at a lower price would have been nicer.

 

[alkemyst]

Cartridges use more expensive components and are more difficult to mass produce. That's a big part of why the PS1 games in there are $10-$15 cheaper. It's easy to see why the N64 struggled. No loading times were nice, but bigger games and better music at a lower price would have been nicer.

Same as the cassette vs CD, VHS vs DVD debate.

 

[Remobz]

I bought my first HD, 20MB (yes, Megabyte) MFM Seagate for $379.99 in 1988. That's quite a leap in 8 years in both price, size and performance.

I was 15 years old in 1988. Back then, my passion was baseball, BMX bikes and skate boarding. All my money would go towards those sports and hobbies.

I knew some "nerdy" kids that would have those fancy computer gadgets and would spend most of their time in doors after school. Sometimes, I would attend a birthday party for one of those kids and would see them playing some computer games. It looked pretty cool back then but I had no clue how expensive it really was. Then again, my hobbies were not exactly cheap either.

Didn't own a personal computer until 1998.

 

[lxskllr]

I didn't have a computer in 96. That fell into a hole where I was computerless. I was more interested in other things. I got back in around 2002 with a Dell, and been in ever since. Hardware isn't especially interesting anymore. Desktops get incremental improvements, with all the real magic going into locked down portables :^/

 

[alkemyst]

I was 15 years old in 1988. Back then, my passion was baseball, BMX bikes and skate boarding. All my money would go towards those sports and hobbies.

I knew some "nerdy" kids that would have those fancy computer gadgets and would spend most of their time in doors after school. Sometimes, I would attend a birthday party for one of those kids and would see them playing some computer games. It looked pretty cool back then but I had no clue how expensive it really was. Then again, my hobbies were not exactly cheap either.

Didn't own a personal computer until 1998.

In all honesty, your family probably couldn't afford a computer.

I was given an Apple //e, 80 column card, 300 baud modem, Apple DMP printer, Grappler+ card, and dual drives in 1983ish. It was around $2600 I believe.

My brother and I would play outside until dark, we were in soccer, baseball, flag and then tackle football, later wrestling, martial arts. We skateboarded, my brother was active in BMX and we did things at the beach when we could.

We'd learn the computer at night and on rained out days.

Back then computers really weren't for nerds, they were for those that had the disposable income and usually had many lining up to play with them.

 

[Harrod]

This is pretty cool, I looked at some old computer shoppers a few days ago while at work and was amazed at the prices of some of the stuff I spent money on back then. It's kindof interesting that the older I get the cheaper I get as well, but back then I was a teenager who had no real bills anyways.

I think the first computer my family had was a 386dx with 8mb of ram and a 40 mb hard drive. I recall my parents paid around 600 dollars for it and me and my 2 brothers are in the same industry now.

Edit: I remember having a friend who picked up a 1 gig drive when it first came out, he claimed that he would be able to fill it up using his modem, sure enough a few months later he said that he did it.

 

[Train]

In all honesty, your family probably couldn't afford a computer.

I was given an Apple //e, 80 column card, 300 baud modem, Apple DMP printer, Grappler+ card, and dual drives in 1983ish. It was around $2600 I believe.

My brother and I would play outside until dark, we were in soccer, baseball, flag and then tackle football, later wrestling, martial arts. We skateboarded, my brother was active in BMX and we did things at the beach when we could.

We'd learn the computer at night and on rained out days.

Back then computers really weren't for nerds, they were for those that had the disposable income and usually had many lining up to play with them.

$2600 wasn't typical. My dad brought home a Commodore 64 in 1982 for $100. Me and several of my siblings learned how to program on it. That thing was still ticking when when he decided to get on the internet and bought a Windows 95 machine in ~96.

Probably explains why the C64 sold so well and was a lot of people's first introduction to a computer.

 

[alkemyst]

$2600 wasn't typical. My dad brought home a Commodore 64 in 1982 for $100. Me and several of my siblings learned how to program on it. That thing was still ticking when when he decided to get on the internet and bought a Windows 95 machine in ~96.

Probably explains why the C64 sold so well and was a lot of people's first introduction to a computer.

I know of the Vic20 and C64, it was about 6 times $100 in 1982 unless you got it off the back of a truck.

 

[AdamK47]

1996 was the year I built my first PC. Pentium 166MHz (non-MMX), 430FX motherboard, 16MB EDO memory, 6X CD-ROM, 1.6GB Western Digital HDD, Creative Labs 3D Blaster (Rendition V1000), Creative Labs AWE32, 1.44MB floppy drive, and a cheap Enermax case w/ power supply. Later upgraded to include a Diamond Monster 3D (3Dfx Voodoo) and 8MB more EDO SIMM memory for 24MB total. Killed the power supply shortly after the upgrade.

I remember the Best Buy print ads fondly. I would always check them to see how far mainstream pre-built systems progressed compared to what I was running.