rpiguy9907

Housing prices have far outpaced income but that is largely due to a credit bubble and modern building regulations. Mortgages used to be 10-20 years and you had to have even more than 20% to put down (30%-50% down). Easy credit has caused home costs to sky rocket and made suburban and urban real estate ripe for speculation. The average home was about $12K in 1961. In my area new homes sell for 30-40x that. The average home sold in 1961 was 600-1000sq feet smaller than homes today, did not have central air conditioning, and typically only had 1 bathroom. So making an Apples to Apples comparison is tough. What did a 2400 square foot house with 2.5 bathrooms and a central conditioning system cost in 1961? I have no idea.

Your question piqued my curiosity. The correct answer is that if you look at Average/Mean income then yes it has kept up with inflation. If you look at Median income (where most people fall within the distribution) it is woefully behind. In 1961 the Median income was $5700 per year. If it tracked with inflation the Median income should be $49000 today. The actual median income today in the US is 32K. Median income would have to be boosted 50% to match 1961. The average income is at 48K so almost right on track - when the average stays the same but the median falls it indicates that the distribution has changed. In this case it tells us that a smaller group of people are getting paid more and larger group of people are getting paid less, which makes sense as we have traded many blue collar jobs for far fewer higher paying white collar jobs.

Looks very much like a rebadged Focus Pro keyboard.

30 years later the C128 finally pays off for gaming! I know there were a few that used the borders trick, but nothing this impressive.

It is super impressive. It is an exact copy of Super Mario, which was released 5 years after the C64 on a dedicated game machine with more sprites, more colors, more tiles, more sound channels, and a 70% faster processor. If you run this on a C128 it uses the 2mhz borders trick and you get no slowdowns.

Some of the early arcade ports like Mario Bros and PopEye are very good. Qbert and Frogger were also excellent on the C64. This s a good starting place for you: https://www.lemon64.com/games/votes_list.php

Ironically, in the early days DOS was simple but price was the barrier. By the time PC prices came down enough for home users, DOS had grown very complex and there was a usability barrier. DOS was incredibly simple until the 286 came along and suddenly memory management became a thing. There was hardly anything for the home user to configure, didn't really need to fiddle with config.sys or AUTOEXEC.BAT (in fact I believe these weren't even in the early versions of DOS). TSRs and drivers didn't really become necessary until the second half of the 80s. Early disk games auto-booted or required very simple commands to start.

What continent are you on? I normally dont part with CIAs but I will sell you one at a low price since youve stuck with this C64 instead of recycling it.

Thx too far for me!

Near Lebanon?

My parents over the years had accumulated savings bonds given to me by various relatives and turned them over to me when I turned 18. Being the responsible *cough* young person that I was, I immediately went out and bought a Pentium 75. The sysop of my favorite local BBS ran a 486DX/100 and was super jealous. I felt like a rich kid for once. It came with 8mb of RAM and I wanted 16mb for the upcoming Windows 95, so I scoured computer shopper for the cheapest memory. Fun times.

Thanks!

I am not actually a newb to the IIGS, Ive owned and used one for years BUT Ive never tried programming on it and I finally have some time to look into it and have a couple of questions: I presume the BASIC in ROM is identical to AppleSoft BASIC in other Apple IIs (no support for added memory, etc.)? But it will still work in fast mode right? Could be fun to try some slow BASIC games on a system a little faster than the other Apple IIs. What are my other options for BASIC? Are any of the options mostly Microsoft compatible? Thank you for any tips!

They are currently in a that odd, in-between state. Rare enough to be somewhat collectable, but not enough enthusiasts to make it really valuable. They usually sit on eBay between $100-300. Given how little software was every written for it, I think that is pretty fair. Since there is no larger retro-community around them you have to depend on manuals and old documents to figure out its workings. Luckily quite a few great resources were uploaded to Archive.org https://archive.org/details/apf_imagination_machine Happy reading!

Cool machine!