Period pricing references (was Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers)

One of the cool things about an Atari 800 system a friend gave me when he moved was that it came with Atari official price sheets, and, since the donor was an Engineer, he saved every single receipt for every item he ever bought - $2,500 for the base system (CPU, 32KB RAM, printer, external serial ports, modem, two floppies, acoustic coupler, tape drive, manuals, joysticks, etc.) and that was about 80% of MSRP! It's only one data point, but it is *spot on*. Some real person paid those real dollars for a machine that is completely documented. It's also interesting to look back at what the big iron used to cost. Somewhere, I have a DEC third-party-reseller flyer listing the RA81 at $14,000 (we paid $26,000 for one in 1984) - that's about $33/MB, or about 1650000% more than a modern 100GB drive ($0.002/MB) While I don't have a massive pile of pricing data (that isn't in the backs of magazines), I think it's an interesting category of data to save. Sometimes the "good old days" don't look so good.