I just bought a 10-pack of 3M 1.2MB floppies on ebay for $11US shipped. Just wondering, what would I have paid for such a thing when they were newly manufactured and still available in ordinary retail stores?
I remember paying 20 Finnish marks per pack of those 3M floppies in 1990, but considering the inflation and currency change to Euro makes it bit more difficult to compare. Direct currency conversion without considering the inflation would make them cost about $4US per pack which would probably be much more if you consider the inflation.
Quick check of a scanned RadioShack catalog from 1988 shows $13.95 for a pack of three or $34.95 for a pack of 10 high-density 5.25in floppy disks. Of course, RadioShack was never known for having the lowest prices...it's just the easiest source I could readily think of for pricing information that I know for a fact is still available online. 😜 I'd say maybe $20 is a more realistic late-80s price for a ten-pack.
So back in the late 80s, a 10 pack of 720k disks were $10 USD, and 10 pack of 1.44s were $20 , so i would think 5.25" is around that range. These were for name brand disks (3M, Dysan, etc).
I have no clue what I'm doing! If you want to watch me fumble through all my retro projects, you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/user/MrDavejustdave
07 1994 Poland computer exchange market prices:
$0.5 1.2 noname
$0.7 1.2 Dysan/Verbatim DLP
$0.68 1.44 noname
$1.2 1.44 Verbatim DLP
Divide prices by 22 for $:
OK thanks very much. So, it looks like, in the 80's, they were pricey, at least when you consider our modern expectations about what comparable things today should cost. And I suppose the Polish computer exchange document shows that demand had fallen to very little by the mid-90s. I'm pretty sure they weren't even making 5.25" drives by that time. Thanks for the info.
Inflation (which will vary by country).
In the US, 1989-2019 that's about 100%. So $11 today would have been about $5.40 then in today's money. $13.95 then would be $28.60 now.
So a Poquet PC would be about $4100 in today's money, and a Mac Portable from 1989 almost $15,000.
*Too* *many* *things*!
Same source 08 1991, divide by 11 for $
Even by 1991 5 inch HD floppies were almost 2x cheaper than 3.5 ones.
I remember AU$0.30 each for 360kb 5.25", AU$0.70 for 720kb 3.5" and AU$1 for 1.44MB 3.5" - all no brand cheapest available in bulk packs. I think 1.2MB 5.25" were around AU$0.80, but I wasn't using that many of them. I got a couple of 100 boxes of recycled 1.2MB for ~$10 and that was all the 1.2MB I ever needed.
