[Elecraft] Price Comparisons

[Tony Estep]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 7:10 PM, Fred Jensen <k6dgw at foothill.net> wrote:

> ...I don't know what a 1977 dollar would be worth today...


Well, the CPI as reported by the St. Louis Federal Reserve was 224.43 at
April 1, 2011, the most recent point; at April 1, 1977 it was 60.00. So if
something cost $1 then and its price rose exactly in line with the CPI, it
would cost $3.74 today.

This sez that today's $3000 transceiver would have sold for $802 in 1977
dollars. In fact, as Fred's email points out, a nice S-line setup sold for
many times that, an illustration of how the real prices of technology goods
have come down over time.

A 4-channel radio-control tranmitter sold for about $400 in those days, the
equivalent of about 1500 bucks now -- but in fact you can go down to the
hobby shop and buy one for less than $100.

And of course so much of today's technology goods wouldn't have been
available at any price. In 1977 I bought a Tektronix desktop computer for
about $4000, the equivalent of nearly 15,000 of today's dollars. It had 16K
of RAM, ran Basic programs that could only be a max of about 150 lines long,
and stored programs on an internal cassette drive -- no data storage.

Those of us who like hi-tech toys are able to indulge ourselves now more
than ever.

73,
Tony KT0NY