If you shop, you can buy a very beautiful laptop for about $595. Maybe not the top-notch, but the multi-core, large hard drive and large color screen are still very good. But in the 1980s, Commodore 64 boasted that for only $595, they could offer you more than anyone else at twice the price. After all, 64K of RAM! 16 full-color graphics! [Lunduke] dig it out A bunch of ads like this And have some thoughts about them, we really like to travel along the road of memory.
If you look at other contemporary computers, they do cost more, although sometimes this is not a fair comparison. For example, the TRS80 III sells for $999 and is equipped with 16K memory, but it also has its own display—but not a color display.
Surprisingly, we have gone from being a reasonable amount of RAM in a personal computer to 16K to a situation where it is not even worth having a flash drive with that capacity. We also have to note that although computing power per dollar has now reached its peak, computers are actually not that interesting. We like to connect a teletypewriter to our 1802 ELF and design a 300 baud modem for our TRS-80. Of course, we don’t have Skyrim or HD movies, but we still have a great time.
If you want to relive these exciting days, it is easy to build your own C64 with different fidelity. Simulating this thing on any type of modern hardware is also trivial.