!Pr1
Remembering When...........................Bob Sander-Cederlof

There is a lot of grumbling going on, or at least so says the media.  Supposedly Mac owners are MAD over Apple's $995 price tag for the 512K upgrade kit.  And the fact that new buyers get a lower system price makes them even madder.

If it's true, then I guess the computer "for the rest of us" has found a market with a real-estate or Detroit mentality.  Haven't they noticed that prices on virtually all electronic items go down every year?  (I always say, "If houses and cars had gone the way electronics has over the last 30 years, we would now be able to buy a 3-bedroom home for two dollars and a nice car for 50 cents.  Of course they would both fit on the head of a pin....")

I remember when I bought my Apple, with two rows of 4K RAM chips totalling 8K bytes.  Adding another row of 4K chips would have cost me about $50.  The price at that time for one set of 8 16K chips was $520.  Through a special arrangement at Mostek, members of our local club were able to get them for $150.  So to raise my Apple from 8K to 48K cost me $450.  Retail price would have been $1560, plus tax.

Looking back even further, I found a letter from a Raymond Hoobler to the editor of the Journal of Dentistry, from October 1976.  Ray owned an Apple 1, which was populated with 1K RAM chips.  He was VERY happy with Apple's promise of an upgrade kit consisting of 4K RAM chips for ONLY $500!

It will not be too long before the price of 256K RAMs drops.  Then we can start grumbling about the price of 4-megabyte upgrade kits.  Or, we could rejoice at the blessings of ever improving technology, mass marketing, and understanding wives.
