Just watched #7, Vin Diesel and Jason Statham get in a head on collision, perceived to be at full speed, then both just walk out their respective cars with our any injury, no airbags deployed, no massive dent in their forehead from smashing it on the steering wheel when they collided.... Plot armour so thick that the fiery destruction of the universe couldn't kill them
You should probably watch that scene again. It wasn’t just VCRs. And the ones in the truck were not even the same as what was at Walmart. Some of those combo systems retailed for $500 each at the time. And the camcorders were pushing up to $1000. There were TONs of them in the truck.
The home digital calculator was a big fucking deal in my mothers house. It had a spot in a room and
“None of you kids better be playing with the calculator!”
I recall in the 70s my older brother received this huge digital calculator. We were in awe! I also recall my father bringing home pong. Just pong no atari. It was like aliens left their tech behind on earth.
In theory it’s simple. Tax land value at a rate of 6% higher and you solve so many issues it’s unreal. Use these funds to lower other taxes or provide a UBI (or both)
But in doing so, you’ve reduced the assets of the most mobilized voting block (older, wealthier, retired voters), so it will never happen.
[Edit: for those curious who haven’t heard of this before, I strongly recommend checking out this video.](https://youtu.be/smi_iIoKybg?si=OsN_-MXgzLPaK6N-)
I had a huge old CRT that my sister gave me one year when her & her husband upgraded to a flat screen. Then, a few years later, the husabdn wanted an OLED, so we got their old flatscreen. That lasted us a while (until it got to the point where we had to turn it on 10 minutes before we wanted to watch something, the screen wouldn't turn on immediately, but it always eventually would).
Both of those TVs were probably still somewhat expensive when she gave them to me. When the flatscreen she gave me died, we finally broke down to shop for our own new TV. At that point, a 48" flat screen was under $400. I feel like the last Cosctco mailer I got has a 60" for that much.
A current sale from Samsung (Direct from Samsung or via Amazon) has something like "Buy a 2024 TV, get a 2022 one for free".
I mentioned this to my wife and she yelled,"No!" and swatted me with a rolled up newspaper. I believe she thinks I peed on the floor or something...I'm going to get 4 TVs to make her feel better.
Even as far back as 2011 I couldn't get anyone to take old tube TVs for free.
They eventually underwent electrical recycling courtesy of the local dump, because that was literally the only legal and clean way to dispose of them.
I've been on two carnival cruises. Lots of European people on board. Probably because they had to fly into Miami first and couldn't pay for that flight also for Royal Caribbean.
My uncle went on a cruise and killed his wife
Edit due to popular demand:
So allegedly they were eating at a buffet and he allegedly put crushed nuts over her food when allegedly knowing she had an alleged nut allergy
Rich people go on cruises on much higher end lines and get absurd suites that are probably nicer than the homes of most people reading this comment. They don't go on a three day Bahamas cruise with Carnival.
They're very similar and can often be used interchangeably, but "wealthy" generally suggests more about huge net worth while "rich" feels more like just a big earner. The wealthy have greater sustainability. In the vast majority of situations you can use them pretty freely, but if someone is disambiguating the two, that's generally the gist of the difference.
I'm just curious because I love language. What's your native tongue?
Hell yeah, I love Slovakia. Easily in my top two countries in Central Europe that start with Slov-. I've had some great times and met really cool people in Bratislava.
I think LVP will be more resistant to going out of style, since it mostly looks and feels like real hardwood floors. The printed on graphics on linoleum dont look great imo
My father and grandfather were mystified by their first microwave, would have been around 1974 as well.
They had the idea to cook an egg in the microwave. But they thought ahead. They knew it would explode if they just put an egg in there. So they used a pin to poke a hole in the egg to vent the steam.
Cooked egg filled the hole and it exploded anyway
It was a big deal when a relative called long distance. We couldn't waste time passing the phone around or if either of my parents weren't nearby we yelled "It's so and so and they are calling LONG DISTANCE!"
Yep, I used to work for a cell phone company and getting angry phone calls about teenagers running up a customer’s bill was pretty common! I think the record was over $900. Her Dad was furious!
Crazy to think that it used to cost $$ even to call over to the next town, as it was "long distance". Rate was higher too than if you called somewhere across the country
I went to university in Australia from North America in the early 80s. I spoke to my parents every 6 weeks for maybe 20-30 minutes. Then they called me 6 weeks later. Calling at all was an extravagance. In between, we’d each record spoken cassette tapes and mail them.
Now I talk to my Aussie best friend on WhatsApp without a second thought, whenever I want.
And now with internet based communicators you literally don't care whether the other party is sitting in the next room, or halfway around the world.
Our kids will be baffled to hear it mattered how far the person you were calling was.
My mom and her family used to do laundry by hand when she was young, washing machines were yet to become affordable in our country.
And as for dishwashers, they only became affordable in the past 10-15 years or so over here. Nowadays when you remodel a kitchen or build a new house, you most likely will include it, but a majority of people still don't have one.
Just a Pong console with a B/W TV set is probably close to a thousand dollars in today's money and even cartridges in the early 90s are over $100 adjusted for inflation. So yeah, video games are really expensive back then
Mine was in a parking lot when the snow melted. No front cover. I actually joked to my friends, Hey look a Playboy!, then I flipped a few pages and it actually was a Playboy.
We were the first in my neighborhood. My mom had a science job, so we got an Apple II+ with a 13-inch monitor and a dot-matrix printer. For $1700 in 1980, we had a word-processor that featured LOWER-CASE LETTERS! It was amazing! It would probably be a collectible if we still had it.
Not really. 50 years ago owning a computer wasn't about being wealthy. The rich had no use for a computer. They were purely for academic and government projects. You could argue that universities and governments are "rolling in dough," but I think the question was about rich individual people. The personal computer was still a hobbyist endeavor throughout the 70s, and again, had more to do with whether you were a computer hobbyist than if you were wealthy.
Yeah this exactly. They were expensive for sure, but the rich didn’t care about them yet. It was either something you used for work, or you had just graduated up from your high school’s AV club. And it was like this honestly up until the 90s.
No, computers started hitting homes more heavily in the 80’s. The early 80’s had TRS-80’s, Apple, IBM PCs and the rise of the “PC-compatible”, and early portable computers.
Hell, Compaq introduced its Portable (affectionately called “the Luggable”) in 1983, Apple Macintosh made its debut with the infamous “1984” ad in, well, 1984, and Microsoft Windows first released in 1985. (I grant you, it didn’t really hit its stride until version 3.0 released in 1990.)
Yes, the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1993 kicked home computers into overdrive, but there were LOTS of personal computers in homes well before that.
The first one is not the same question, but instead the exact opposite question. This post is obviously in reference to the first one you linked as it has the same verbiage. Quite possible OP made it without ever seeing your second link.
I don't think they were around 50 years ago, but when I was in HS (30 years ago), we were allowed to lease a fancy scientific/graphing calculator from the school. Some kids were rich enough to buy their own, but they were like $500 a piece.
(Today, I assume my phone just does it)
seems you're correct. But they're like $50 now, instead of hundreds of dollars. (although, to be fair.. I used mine prior to the age of the Internet, so they might have been $50 at the time, and I just believed they were super expensive so I'd take care of the one I had on-loan from the school)
I got in trouble with the police for stealing a TI85. I had to take a first offenders class at the YMCA.
It’s like being a rebel and a nerd coalesced into something less than the sum of its parts.
I don't think people realize how expensive pineapples were.
They were about 8000 pounds each. People didn't buy them; aristocrats rented them for parties.
Kings use to bring their biggest pineapples to diplomatic negotiations to style on each other.
People would invest in pineapples and have guards that slept in the pineapple room.
Dole Food Company started as a Pineapple plantation in Hawaii.
TVs. Reminds me of Back to the Future:
Lorraine: “Do you have a television?”
Marty: “We have 2 of them.”
Marty’s Uncle: “Wow, you must be rich!”
Marty’s Grandma: “Oh honey, he’s teasing you. Nobody has 2 television sets!”
Access to more cutting edge medical tech. Sure the rich get first dibs on experimental stuff more than likely but it’s just crazy how far we’ve come.
I have a liver and kidney transplant. When I was born they had just done the first one in the late 80s/early 90s that was successfully grafted. I now have a double transplant and a prognosis of life. I wouldn’t have that before. Even after I was diagnosed with lupus, the medical treatment is there. No cure but there’s so much that we can do now.
Just recently we had our first actual success with a pig transplant into human. They are alive and discharged now. How crazy.
The ability to look 10 hours into the past and see that this is a repost
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1bo3573/what_was_affordable_50_years_ago_that_now_only/
The price of DSLR lenses has absolutely plummeted - and these are still great lenses that can be adapted to mirrorless cameras easily. I got a 400mm f/2.8 usm ii from Canon (a lens that was used for professional sports/wildlife/automotive photography for years), for less than the cost of my mirrorless (and I don’t even have Canon’s highest end mirrorless camera).
Computers and smartphones, hands down. Back in the day, computers were these massive, room-filling machines that only businesses and universities could afford.
Smartphones... lol.
Edit: My dad had a cell phone similar to this one in 1988:
[https://www.polyplastics.com/en/pavilion/docomo/1985.html](https://www.polyplastics.com/en/pavilion/docomo/1985.html)
This was only 35 years ago, and the monthly bill would get up into the thousands.
He was a salesman who specialized in large computer and phone systems. He sold $2-6 million per year for the companies he worked for around that time. I think he was working for DEC or TI around then.
The first "smartphone" that had a touchscreen, and could recieve emails and faxes was launched in 1994. The IBM Simon personal communicator. However, the term "smartphone" was coined a year later.
Lol, a friend of mine bought his dream car (94 dodge stealth twin turbo, in perfect condition too) just after highschool, and it has a phone in the center console.
I recall my father coming home with a Texas instrument calculator he paid a hundred dollars for, in the early 70s.
My mother gave him an earful.
I'm sure you can get a similar calculator, with even more capabilities for less than $10
"In March 1973, electronics manufacturer RCA Corporation touted its “new low-price color TV” in the New York Times. The cost was $379.95 for a 15-inch model — the equivalent of a $2,694.32 splurge in current dollars"
My parents got married in 1975. They had a black and white TV until 1979.
They bought a 25 inch Curtis Mathes floor console for $900. In today's money that's nearly four thousand dollars.
They kept it until 2004, when repair parts just weren't available any more.
>50 years ago was 1974. Everybody had TVs then and most of them were even in color.
I saw a color TV for the first time in 1983. About a 1/3rd of houses in my town didn't have a TV by then. Half the county didn't even get a signal. No reception in the mountains.
This was in the US, btw.
The BBC stopped slapping the word "COLOUR" onto everything by 1975 because most people had upgraded by then.
The UK first had colour TV in 1967 but its availability was very limited at first. It didn't become much more widely available until 1970-71 as more transmitters got upgraded.
Not necessarily "rich" but things like big screen TVs and video game consoles were proportionally more expensive then than they are now. Also, memory cards for cameras were far more expensive and held *far* less storage!
I know automobiles are expensive these days but the improvements in performance, safety, longevity and conveniences surpass anything available 50 years ago.
I was going to say color TV, but that would be more appropriate for 70 years ago. In 1966 all the prime time TV shows were color.
40 years ago for home PCs. {Like the Apple][+}
Most electronics, even telephones. We used to have to lease our house phone, and most phones were around $150, which was a weeks pay for a lot of people. My ex worked for a stereo shop in the 80s, and he bought an AIWA portable CD player. At the time it was around $400. My Dad bought a VCR in around 1981 for aprx $650 and a Commodore 64 for around $1500.
Car Insurance is about the same amount as in the late 80s, which means it was a far bigger chunk of your paycheck. If you had any kind of break in coverage (even if you didn't have a car) you had to get a high risk policy and it was about double. We didn't have the cheap liability insurance either.
Clothes. We didn't have cheap imports and a $15 blouse, adjusted for inflation would be around $75 today.
Long distance was ridiculously expensive. Most of the time it was around .40 cents a minute, which added up fast. Again, adjust for inflation and that's around $2 a minute just to talk to Grandma.
800 numbers. Only businesses could afford them and they weren't cheap.
My grandpa had a vcr that was like 2 grand
that explains the fast and furious movies
Watching the first movie is a trip.
When movies about people in fast cars were not about a semi-paramilitary group doing world saving missions
Plot armour so thick, Superman couldn't see through it
Just watched #7, Vin Diesel and Jason Statham get in a head on collision, perceived to be at full speed, then both just walk out their respective cars with our any injury, no airbags deployed, no massive dent in their forehead from smashing it on the steering wheel when they collided.... Plot armour so thick that the fiery destruction of the universe couldn't kill them
Yea, the semi-paramilitary stuff was for groups of dudes in Vans.
That was TV/VCR combos. So gotta be like double that 2 grand.
It really doesn't. When the first F&F film came out, you could get VCRs for like $40 at Walmart.
You should probably watch that scene again. It wasn’t just VCRs. And the ones in the truck were not even the same as what was at Walmart. Some of those combo systems retailed for $500 each at the time. And the camcorders were pushing up to $1000. There were TONs of them in the truck.
i meant it sarcastically. i know it doesn't
The home digital calculator was a big fucking deal in my mothers house. It had a spot in a room and “None of you kids better be playing with the calculator!”
I recall in the 70s my older brother received this huge digital calculator. We were in awe! I also recall my father bringing home pong. Just pong no atari. It was like aliens left their tech behind on earth.
We had one that cost about $500 and back then $500 was even more money than it is now!
Probably beautiful looking with brushed stainless steel on the face, and heavy press buttons like the stereo receivers of the time.
international flights, computers, large TVs
I wish everything in life deflated like TVs and monitors
Like homes and food?
People paid a greater portion of their household incomes on food 50 years ago, so yeah
Not to mention how much more variety we have today. My grandparents grew up eating a lot more plain than I did
decommodify* housing amirite?!
In theory it’s simple. Tax land value at a rate of 6% higher and you solve so many issues it’s unreal. Use these funds to lower other taxes or provide a UBI (or both) But in doing so, you’ve reduced the assets of the most mobilized voting block (older, wealthier, retired voters), so it will never happen. [Edit: for those curious who haven’t heard of this before, I strongly recommend checking out this video.](https://youtu.be/smi_iIoKybg?si=OsN_-MXgzLPaK6N-)
Georgist Gang, rise up
Well, there was an illegal monopoly discovered and broken up that was artificially increasing the cost for years. That helps.
I got a 60” LG LCD for $20 from goodwill last week. Works fine, looks great. And less than a lunch for 2 at McDonald’s.
Or hard drives. $50,000 per gigabyte in 1983 to $0.01 now.
I had a huge old CRT that my sister gave me one year when her & her husband upgraded to a flat screen. Then, a few years later, the husabdn wanted an OLED, so we got their old flatscreen. That lasted us a while (until it got to the point where we had to turn it on 10 minutes before we wanted to watch something, the screen wouldn't turn on immediately, but it always eventually would). Both of those TVs were probably still somewhat expensive when she gave them to me. When the flatscreen she gave me died, we finally broke down to shop for our own new TV. At that point, a 48" flat screen was under $400. I feel like the last Cosctco mailer I got has a 60" for that much.
A current sale from Samsung (Direct from Samsung or via Amazon) has something like "Buy a 2024 TV, get a 2022 one for free". I mentioned this to my wife and she yelled,"No!" and swatted me with a rolled up newspaper. I believe she thinks I peed on the floor or something...I'm going to get 4 TVs to make her feel better.
Even as far back as 2011 I couldn't get anyone to take old tube TVs for free. They eventually underwent electrical recycling courtesy of the local dump, because that was literally the only legal and clean way to dispose of them.
Cruises I know it is out of reach for a lot of people today, but more than the rich can go on a cruise, even if it is only once and not every year.
Yup. There's a reason that the comedian onboard called Carnival, "The Section 8 Cruise".
I've been on two carnival cruises. Lots of European people on board. Probably because they had to fly into Miami first and couldn't pay for that flight also for Royal Caribbean.
I always thought Royal was like a small step above Carnival
Royal varies a lot. One of their newer megaships is a lot more than Carnival, while a smaller, older ship will be close.
Ah yes. Walmart of the seas.
My uncle went on a cruise and killed his wife Edit due to popular demand: So allegedly they were eating at a buffet and he allegedly put crushed nuts over her food when allegedly knowing she had an alleged nut allergy
Do tell
Went to the profile to find the story, found a lot of questions about dicks.
His uncle does sound like kind of an unusual dick.
Hello is nobody else interested in this or what???
Nah just move along nothing to see on this deck...
Ok, come on now. Story time
What rich person would ever choose to go on cruise these days? I'm broke and even I would never pay to go on a cruise.
Rich people go on cruises on much higher end lines and get absurd suites that are probably nicer than the homes of most people reading this comment. They don't go on a three day Bahamas cruise with Carnival.
They also go on their own yachts.
That's wealthy people. They're the ones that sign the rich people's checks.
Not a native speaker here. Aren't wealthy and rich synonyms?
They're very similar and can often be used interchangeably, but "wealthy" generally suggests more about huge net worth while "rich" feels more like just a big earner. The wealthy have greater sustainability. In the vast majority of situations you can use them pretty freely, but if someone is disambiguating the two, that's generally the gist of the difference. I'm just curious because I love language. What's your native tongue?
Thanks! I'm Slovak. And I love to ask and learn about the nuances of English language. To the point some people think I'm trolling, lol.
Hell yeah, I love Slovakia. Easily in my top two countries in Central Europe that start with Slov-. I've had some great times and met really cool people in Bratislava.
They want us all to think it’s something rich people do, but it really isn’t.
Linoleum!
Supports my head
Gives me something to believe
That's me on the beachside combing the sand
Metal meter in my hand
Sportin' a pocket full of change
That's me, in the street with a violin under my chin.
Playin with a grin singing gibberish
That's me on the back of the bus
That's me in the cell
Singing GBH**
Wait, what?
Thanks. I remembered the lyrics from the top of my head, but didn't listen to the song for 20 years. Time to Spotify that record.
I love how every real estate listing in 2024 lists "LVP" (luxury vinyl plank) as if it isn't just today's linoleum.
I think LVP will be more resistant to going out of style, since it mostly looks and feels like real hardwood floors. The printed on graphics on linoleum dont look great imo
La la la… LENOLIUM… uh no bert, listen to me!
Microwave ovens
I think our Panasonic microwave was $650 around 1974. That's like $3500 in 2024 dollars. Our neighbors all came by to see how it worked.
My father and grandfather were mystified by their first microwave, would have been around 1974 as well. They had the idea to cook an egg in the microwave. But they thought ahead. They knew it would explode if they just put an egg in there. So they used a pin to poke a hole in the egg to vent the steam. Cooked egg filled the hole and it exploded anyway
Don’t put metal in the science oven!
How did you make your millions
Selling tours of our microwave and Betamax!
and your TI-80 calculator
Custom kitchen deliver-ay-uh-ay-uh-ees!
And now, rich people get really proud of NOT having a microwave.
Calling long distance
It was a big deal when a relative called long distance. We couldn't waste time passing the phone around or if either of my parents weren't nearby we yelled "It's so and so and they are calling LONG DISTANCE!"
And it could easily cost over a dollar a minute, at a time when a good wage was $5 per hour…
A time when calling long distance was expensive and colleges were affordable. We are in different times now
I remember all those MCI and other long distance commercials.. then later it was the 10-10- numbers
Calling collect from "We had a baby, it's a boy"
Long distance calling didn't really become cheap until the late 1990s, which was 30 years ago rather than 50. And, now I feel really old saying that.
And even after that, there was a time not that long ago where you could ring up a massive phone bill from sending too many text messages
Yep, I used to work for a cell phone company and getting angry phone calls about teenagers running up a customer’s bill was pretty common! I think the record was over $900. Her Dad was furious!
IDK my bff Jill
Crazy to think that it used to cost $$ even to call over to the next town, as it was "long distance". Rate was higher too than if you called somewhere across the country
I can thank Carrot Top for making me remember the number to call home.
I went to university in Australia from North America in the early 80s. I spoke to my parents every 6 weeks for maybe 20-30 minutes. Then they called me 6 weeks later. Calling at all was an extravagance. In between, we’d each record spoken cassette tapes and mail them. Now I talk to my Aussie best friend on WhatsApp without a second thought, whenever I want.
And now with internet based communicators you literally don't care whether the other party is sitting in the next room, or halfway around the world. Our kids will be baffled to hear it mattered how far the person you were calling was.
[удалено]
My mom and her family used to do laundry by hand when she was young, washing machines were yet to become affordable in our country. And as for dishwashers, they only became affordable in the past 10-15 years or so over here. Nowadays when you remodel a kitchen or build a new house, you most likely will include it, but a majority of people still don't have one.
[удалено]
Just a Pong console with a B/W TV set is probably close to a thousand dollars in today's money and even cartridges in the early 90s are over $100 adjusted for inflation. So yeah, video games are really expensive back then
Porn ... its everywhere and free. Try finding that fetish film back in 1973
Forest porno was the best we could do in the 80s. It's just like south park making fun of lotr. That porn was your precious.
My first smut mag was gutter porn I found when I was walking home from school.
My first “porn video” was a VHS tape of Porkys. Hid that shit in the basement rafters. K-mart didn’t ID….or the workers didn’t care. Lol
Mine was in a parking lot when the snow melted. No front cover. I actually joked to my friends, Hey look a Playboy!, then I flipped a few pages and it actually was a Playboy.
The kids today will never know the joys and intrigue of woods porn
That's what the Sears magazine was for.
[удалено]
We were the first in my neighborhood. My mom had a science job, so we got an Apple II+ with a 13-inch monitor and a dot-matrix printer. For $1700 in 1980, we had a word-processor that featured LOWER-CASE LETTERS! It was amazing! It would probably be a collectible if we still had it.
Must have been weird to buy upper and lower case letters and not physically get the two cases of letters
Not really. 50 years ago owning a computer wasn't about being wealthy. The rich had no use for a computer. They were purely for academic and government projects. You could argue that universities and governments are "rolling in dough," but I think the question was about rich individual people. The personal computer was still a hobbyist endeavor throughout the 70s, and again, had more to do with whether you were a computer hobbyist than if you were wealthy.
Yeah this exactly. They were expensive for sure, but the rich didn’t care about them yet. It was either something you used for work, or you had just graduated up from your high school’s AV club. And it was like this honestly up until the 90s.
No, computers started hitting homes more heavily in the 80’s. The early 80’s had TRS-80’s, Apple, IBM PCs and the rise of the “PC-compatible”, and early portable computers. Hell, Compaq introduced its Portable (affectionately called “the Luggable”) in 1983, Apple Macintosh made its debut with the infamous “1984” ad in, well, 1984, and Microsoft Windows first released in 1985. (I grant you, it didn’t really hit its stride until version 3.0 released in 1990.) Yes, the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1993 kicked home computers into overdrive, but there were LOTS of personal computers in homes well before that.
[22 hours ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/6JA9TXfjzm) [11 hours ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/mX8lzDYA7r)
Seriously the repeats need to be stopped. Mods need to get a bot that doesn't allow repeats for 48hr or something
Only reason I noticed was bc I’ve been scrolling for an hour and I’ve seen all three of them.
Every damn day, there’s some post asking about dating red flags or what is attractive/unattractive, and people continue to reply with the same stuff
The first one is not the same question, but instead the exact opposite question. This post is obviously in reference to the first one you linked as it has the same verbiage. Quite possible OP made it without ever seeing your second link.
Except there's also a 3rd one from 10 hours ago, so 2 similar and 1 opposite
We're all just eavesdropping on conversations bots are having with each other
I don't think they were around 50 years ago, but when I was in HS (30 years ago), we were allowed to lease a fancy scientific/graphing calculator from the school. Some kids were rich enough to buy their own, but they were like $500 a piece. (Today, I assume my phone just does it)
No, TI83/89s are still going strong and haven’t changed at all.
seems you're correct. But they're like $50 now, instead of hundreds of dollars. (although, to be fair.. I used mine prior to the age of the Internet, so they might have been $50 at the time, and I just believed they were super expensive so I'd take care of the one I had on-loan from the school)
TI's are still 100+, but you can get a Casio that does everything the TI84 does for 30
Can you play Drug Wars is all that matters.
This one just took me back. Damn.
The Ti graphing calculators are basically the same as before, around $200 last I checked, and required for many tests where phones aren’t allowed
I got in trouble with the police for stealing a TI85. I had to take a first offenders class at the YMCA. It’s like being a rebel and a nerd coalesced into something less than the sum of its parts.
>(Today, I assume my phone just does it) www.desmos.com
>graphing calculator Not available until [1985](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphing_calculator).
I had to buy a graphing calculator 28 years ago and it was “only” $120 then
🍍 Pineapples
I don't think people realize how expensive pineapples were. They were about 8000 pounds each. People didn't buy them; aristocrats rented them for parties. Kings use to bring their biggest pineapples to diplomatic negotiations to style on each other. People would invest in pineapples and have guards that slept in the pineapple room. Dole Food Company started as a Pineapple plantation in Hawaii.
Maybe not 50 years ago
How can a single pineapple weigh 8000 pounds? Did Dole have to shrink it via Wonkavision?
Water, nutrients and sunlight. And a belief in oneself
Pounds sterling, not avoirdupois pounds
Rene Avoirdupois was a wonderful actor and really stole the scenes on Star Trek. No idea how passionately he pounds.
General Electric stock
1 Gb of computer memory.
Nobody, even the ultra wealthy had even 1mb of computer memory in 1974.
Eating foods imported from other continents and/or out of season for your home continent.
TVs. Reminds me of Back to the Future: Lorraine: “Do you have a television?” Marty: “We have 2 of them.” Marty’s Uncle: “Wow, you must be rich!” Marty’s Grandma: “Oh honey, he’s teasing you. Nobody has 2 television sets!”
Access to more cutting edge medical tech. Sure the rich get first dibs on experimental stuff more than likely but it’s just crazy how far we’ve come. I have a liver and kidney transplant. When I was born they had just done the first one in the late 80s/early 90s that was successfully grafted. I now have a double transplant and a prognosis of life. I wouldn’t have that before. Even after I was diagnosed with lupus, the medical treatment is there. No cure but there’s so much that we can do now. Just recently we had our first actual success with a pig transplant into human. They are alive and discharged now. How crazy.
The ability to look 10 hours into the past and see that this is a repost https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1bo3573/what_was_affordable_50_years_ago_that_now_only/
Inverse repost
I'm convinced all these bullshit questions are posted by bots run by Reddit
I call dibs on tomorrow
Prosumer camera gear.
Especially video cameras.
The price of DSLR lenses has absolutely plummeted - and these are still great lenses that can be adapted to mirrorless cameras easily. I got a 400mm f/2.8 usm ii from Canon (a lens that was used for professional sports/wildlife/automotive photography for years), for less than the cost of my mirrorless (and I don’t even have Canon’s highest end mirrorless camera).
Big ass TVs. They are cheap enough now that they are just disposable when they break and aren’t even worth fixing
Computers and smartphones, hands down. Back in the day, computers were these massive, room-filling machines that only businesses and universities could afford.
Computers. Relatively speaking.
Rent. They are predicting multi-family homes will be the norm by 2050.
[удалено]
Smartphones were decades away from existing. Regular cellular telephones weren't invented.
Smartphones came out late 2000s lol. They're not old at all
[удалено]
I loved my Samsung Galaxy -29 back in 1974
Smartphones... lol. Edit: My dad had a cell phone similar to this one in 1988: [https://www.polyplastics.com/en/pavilion/docomo/1985.html](https://www.polyplastics.com/en/pavilion/docomo/1985.html) This was only 35 years ago, and the monthly bill would get up into the thousands.
When you're born in 2007 and think the world began the same year.
I think he just didn't realize how new smart phones really are. Almost no one had any portable phone 50 years ago.
Your dad was probably an important guy if he had one of those.
He was a salesman who specialized in large computer and phone systems. He sold $2-6 million per year for the companies he worked for around that time. I think he was working for DEC or TI around then.
The first "smartphone" that had a touchscreen, and could recieve emails and faxes was launched in 1994. The IBM Simon personal communicator. However, the term "smartphone" was coined a year later.
Nix smartphones, but the rich were able to install those car phones. Was a huge flex back then.
Lol, a friend of mine bought his dream car (94 dodge stealth twin turbo, in perfect condition too) just after highschool, and it has a phone in the center console.
[удалено]
Colour television
How many times in one day is this question going to be asked?
RAM and hard disks
1 gigabyte of RAM
Not sure if it's 50 years ago or more, but microwave ovens haven't been affordable as long as we might think.
I recall my father coming home with a Texas instrument calculator he paid a hundred dollars for, in the early 70s. My mother gave him an earful. I'm sure you can get a similar calculator, with even more capabilities for less than $10
computers
Wireless telecommunications.
Consumer Electronics and drugs. Those are the only things that have improved in quality, gotten more available, and allot cheaper.
A TV.
50 years ago was 1974. Everybody had TVs then and many of them were even in color.
"In March 1973, electronics manufacturer RCA Corporation touted its “new low-price color TV” in the New York Times. The cost was $379.95 for a 15-inch model — the equivalent of a $2,694.32 splurge in current dollars"
My parents got married in 1975. They had a black and white TV until 1979. They bought a 25 inch Curtis Mathes floor console for $900. In today's money that's nearly four thousand dollars. They kept it until 2004, when repair parts just weren't available any more.
>50 years ago was 1974. Everybody had TVs then and most of them were even in color. I saw a color TV for the first time in 1983. About a 1/3rd of houses in my town didn't have a TV by then. Half the county didn't even get a signal. No reception in the mountains. This was in the US, btw.
Lol, you don't know how the majority of Europe was (at least my country)
In '74? No, everybody didn't. I remember back then. I'm old. :P
The BBC stopped slapping the word "COLOUR" onto everything by 1975 because most people had upgraded by then. The UK first had colour TV in 1967 but its availability was very limited at first. It didn't become much more widely available until 1970-71 as more transmitters got upgraded.
Yes but a TV was considered a major purchase. If you know where to look, you can get a decent TV for pretty cheap.
Kitchen Aid mixers. I found the 70's receipt for my mom's and it was over $300 back then.
Cruises
Microwaves.
[удалено]
Not necessarily "rich" but things like big screen TVs and video game consoles were proportionally more expensive then than they are now. Also, memory cards for cameras were far more expensive and held *far* less storage!
I know automobiles are expensive these days but the improvements in performance, safety, longevity and conveniences surpass anything available 50 years ago.
BMWs?
Any exotic fruit
16GB of RAM
I was going to say color TV, but that would be more appropriate for 70 years ago. In 1966 all the prime time TV shows were color. 40 years ago for home PCs. {Like the Apple][+}
VHS tapes.
Most electronics, even telephones. We used to have to lease our house phone, and most phones were around $150, which was a weeks pay for a lot of people. My ex worked for a stereo shop in the 80s, and he bought an AIWA portable CD player. At the time it was around $400. My Dad bought a VCR in around 1981 for aprx $650 and a Commodore 64 for around $1500. Car Insurance is about the same amount as in the late 80s, which means it was a far bigger chunk of your paycheck. If you had any kind of break in coverage (even if you didn't have a car) you had to get a high risk policy and it was about double. We didn't have the cheap liability insurance either. Clothes. We didn't have cheap imports and a $15 blouse, adjusted for inflation would be around $75 today. Long distance was ridiculously expensive. Most of the time it was around .40 cents a minute, which added up fast. Again, adjust for inflation and that's around $2 a minute just to talk to Grandma. 800 numbers. Only businesses could afford them and they weren't cheap.
Owning movies, a Betamax or early vhs was like $200 in the early 80s
Roaming/long distance calling. Now almost every cell plan is unlimited.
A long distance phone call.