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Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Computer Palace (Atari 8-bit)

Computer Palace (Atari 8-bit)



I used to love ads like this. I could make whole Christmas lists out of one of these ads. Granted, I had a Commodore 64 and this particular one is for Atari 8-bit computer stuff but I always wanted one of those too.

It's fun to play with the numbers too. I see that ten single sided 5.25" disks could be had for the low, low price of $15.95. That's 1985 dollars so today that would be at least $20...probably closer to double but for simplicity's sake I'll say $20. That's about what you can get a spindle of 50 blank DVDs for today. Actually, if you went for the cheapest you could find you could probably get 100 for that much...

So let's see, 1 single sided 5.25" floppy disk for the Atari could hold a whopping 90 KB of data. That means it would take more than 52,222 floppies to hold what 1 DVD can hold. So a spindle of 50 would be equivalent to more than 2.6 million floppies. That's more than 260,000 ten packs of floppies...times $20 would be more than $5.2 million...but I'm sure you could get a bulk discount...

This particular ad is from the February 1985 issue of Antic, a magazine for Atari computers.

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