Source: Commodore Magazine – July 1989
As I recall, Computer Direct was where I got most of my Commodore 64 related hardware (I also had the Commodore 64c and 1541-II disk drive). My system was put together in bits and pieces over the course of 3 years or so. I didn’t even have a disk drive the first year but it was complete by the time of this ad.
The prices are pretty reasonable but also typical. You could ignore the prices they are listing as the “value”. I guess those must have been original retail prices or something but certainly no one was paying that much for Commodore equipment at that time (1989). Buying the disk drive and computer separately works out to about $5 more than the package they are selling that includes both.
The other interesting thing to consider in this ad is the price of floppy disks. In bulk you could get them for 19 cents each in bulk. They were generic but that’s still a good price for the time. Each double sided, double density disk could hold about 360 KB (slightly less when formatted for the Commodore 64). So you could fit about 90,000 floppies on a typical 32 GB flash drive. That much storage would have set you back about $17,000 in floppies. And it would have been oh so very much slower. If you started in 1989 you would probably still be working through transferring that much data on floppies.
The above ad is from the July 1989 issue of Commodore Magazine.
