A buddy of mine collects these, and they are pretty damned awesome. He sent me a few recently and I thought it might be fun to post them - if anyone has any of their own to add, feel free!
Jeez, the crazy prices people used to have to pay–5 megabytes available for the “low price” of close to $3000, eek.
BTW who’s the dude in the Commodore ad? He looks familiar–he might have been a sports announcer back when.
I wish I knew the date on that XComp ad.
In my first salaried job, I wrote code for the Apple II. We had 10 MB hard drives called “Siders,” which ran $700. As in “Apple Sider,” heh heh heh. This was a huge price break - I was comparing it to a 5 MB drive that cost maybe $2000 and required CP/M to access, and which was expected to run as a network drive shared by several computers. That’s right, 3-4 computers sharing 5 MB of storage, because data then was strictly either text or databases, no images, and sound files didn’t really exist yet.
EDIT: I think the more-expensive drive I was remembering was a Corvus. I know it required a Z-80 card.
Anyone remember the intentionally cheesy “RAM matters!” “Give the gift of RAM!” in CGW of the 90s?