Retro Scanner of the Week? For only $9,639.64 (in today’s dollars), you could buy a Sharp flatbed scanner in 1989 that could digitize images in 260,000 colors at up to 300 DPI. Why 260,000? I have no idea, but any color support at all made this this one heck of a high quality scanner for the time.

Even today, most 11×17″ scanners still cost an arm and a leg; users have always paid a premium for that much glass real estate. But current models offer much higher resolutions and color depths in a far-sleeker form factor than this one.

[ From CDA Computer Sales Fall/Winter 1989 Catalog ]

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This isn’t the first time VC&G has featured an expensive vintage hard disk, and it should be no surprise to any computer user that computer storage media prices have been decreasing in price exponentially since they were invented. But it’s still fun to marvel at the former cost of what we take for granted today.

Take this ad for a 10 megabyte Morrow Designs Winchester disk drive: the lowest capacity unit sold for $3,695 (US), which is equivalent to $8,451.63 in 2007 dollars. The ad says you could bundle together four of their 26 megabyte hard drives for a total of 104 megabytes. The cost? $19,980, which translates to a stunning $45,700.57 in 2007 dollars. To put that into perspective, $45,700 could buy you roughly 120 terabytes of consumer-level hard drive storage today — 1,153,846 times more space than in 1981.

Nowadays you can sneeze and blow 104 megabytes off into space without realizing it. In 1981, 104 megabytes could crush you to death.

[ From BYTE, January 1981 ]

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And you thought EA Games held the record for simultaneous multi-platform game publication. Ha! Back in my day, you had yer Atari 5200, yer TI-99/4a, yer Atari 400/800/600XL, yer Intellivision, yer Commodore Vic-20, yer Atari 2600, yer Commodore 64, and yer Colecovision. And we liked it.

[ From Personal Computing, December 1983 ]

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In 1983, Hewlett-Packard released what may have been the world’s fist personal computer with an integrated touch-screen. The HP-150 was an 8088-based MS-DOS compatible PC with a handful of advanced features for its time. Unfortunately, the 150’s hardware architecture proved so different that it was not compatible with most IBM PC programs.

The HP-150 uses a crude, low-resolution method for detecting finger placement on its display. The unit projects a grid of infrared beams across the surface of the screen. By sensing which beams are obstructed by an object, the computer can calculate the coordinates of the touch.

Aside from the touch-screen, The HP-150 is notable for being the first U.S. computer to use Sony’s 3 1/2-inch “micro-floppy” disk format, as well as support for Ethernet networking, hard disks, and HP’s first LaserJet printer (through an HP-IB interface). Not bad for 1983.

Anybody have one of these that they don’t want anymore? I’d love to add one to my collection.

[ From Personal Computing, December 1983 ]

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I bought this nifty bubble gum pack at an Eckerd Drug store for 89 cents (US) sometime in the early 1990s. If you haven’t noticed, it resembles a Nintendo Game Boy unit. I can’t remember the shape of its contents (long since chewed), but most likely the gum took the form of flat pink floppy Game Boys. Each pack also contained three trading cards featuring artwork from popular Game Boy games on the front and tips for each game on the back. It’s fun to see where Nintendo merchandising ends up.

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