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points by walrus01 4 days ago | 0 comments
It wasn't that he didn't like computers at the time, he didn't have money for a proper word processing setup. Something good enough to write a full length novel on in 1981 with a printer and the commercial word processing software would have been the equivalent of $3500-4500 or more in today's money adjusted for inflation.
[–] queenkjuul 4 days ago
I think you're off by roughly half; an IBM PC with printer and monitor was about $5000 in 80s money, probably more like $10k adjusted
[–] walrus01 4 days ago
It depends on what range of the years 1981-1984 we're talking about, but yes, it was very costly. Not that a full IBM PC would necessarily be required to write a novel. People were writing whole books on less expensive CP/M based systems with like two 160KB floppy drives. One to boot and run the word processor software from and one for data file storage.

I have a family member who bought an Osborne Portable for something like $1800 1981 money, an inflation calculator says that would be the equivalent of $6,971.17 today.