More from the Door:
Courtesy of loyal reader Kyle comes a look back at the "Special Future Issue" of Video magazine, January 1981. You could get a Pioneer LaserDisc system for only $800 (about $1900 in today's dollars) and the individual discs were only $45/each ($107 each).
Make sure you read Kyle's post. Here's another example from that post:
Another big innovation was the first six hour video tape recorder. it was about $900. There were portable TV's, projection TV's (these were awful to watch). Early home computers. (I had the Texas Instruments computer before upgrading to the Commodore 64 a few years later).
$900 for a video tape recorder! In 1980, the federal minimum wage was $3.10 per hour, meaning a minimum wage worker would have to work about 290 hours to afford one of these bad boys. Now it's $5.15 an hour. A minimum wage worker today would have to work about 58 hours to afford this home theater system from Best Buy.
Let's look at this another way. For the worker who earned the average hourly earnings of $6.82 in June of 1980, he'd have to work nearly 132 hours to get a video tape recorder in 1980. In June 2007, average hourly earnings were $17.26. The average worker would have to work about 17 hours to earn enough to afford the home theater system.
For another example, here's a previous post on the affordability of home computers.