Here’s an eye-opening list of Apple prices from 35 years ago. The wonderful new Apple II came with no monitor (use your tv but buy a special modulator), no disk drive (use a spare cassette player) and a maximum of 48K of memory. Apply a modest 3.71 factor to the prices below and you see that the cheapest Apple II with 4K RAM would cost an equivalent of $4,800. Splurge on a full 48K and you’d have been in for $2,638, or $9,800 in new money. One thing you could do in 1977 that you can’t today, is take the components and build it yourself, thus more than halving the cost. Happy days.
