The Machine Indexan emulation field guide

In 1983, a CD player cost most of a month's pay.

Prices from forty years ago mean nothing on their own. Divided by what people earned that year, they start to. Every bar below is one item's price as a share of a single month's average US wage.

The wage figures come from the SSA wage index and are the average, not the median — pulled upward by high earners, so a typical worker earned less and every bar here is slightly kind. Benchmark prices are reconstructions, not transcribed catalogue line items. They were assembled from period trade press and catalogue reporting and every one is marked verified:false until it is checked against a dated scan. They are shown to give a sense of scale, not as precise figures. The wage series they are divided by, by contrast, is official SSA data.

The other things in the room

Every one of these is marked unverified in the data: they are reconstructions from period trade press and catalogue reporting, not transcribed line items. They are here for scale, not precision. The wage series they are divided by is official.

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

How these numbers were made

Each price is divided by one twelfth of the SSA average wage for the year that price applied. Where a machine sold for a very different price after a cut — the Commodore 64 is the obvious case — this site uses the price most units actually sold at, not the launch price, because that is the one that tells you what buying one really meant.

Prices are gross, before tax, and take no account of where in the country someone lived. Converted foreign prices use annual average exchange rates and are indicative only. Nothing here is precise enough to argue over a few percent; it is precise enough to tell a games console from a household investment.