{"id":787,"date":"2011-07-25T10:23:53","date_gmt":"2011-07-25T15:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=787"},"modified":"2021-05-18T15:15:57","modified_gmt":"2021-05-18T20:15:57","slug":"retro-scan-of-the-week-atari-810-receipt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/787\/retro-scan-of-the-week-atari-810-receipt","title":{"rendered":"[ Retro Scan of the Week ]<\/span> Family Atari 810 Receipt"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Benj's<\/a>Atari 810 Disk Drive Receipt<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Thirty years ago this month, my father ordered an Atari 810<\/a> disk drive for our family’s Atari 800<\/a> from a place called “Omega Sales Co., Inc.” in Rhode Island. Thirty years ago yesterday, Omega filled out the invoice you see here and shipped the order to my dad.<\/p>\n

From the invoice, you can see that my father also ordered a copy of Star Raiders<\/em> for the 800 and a set of joysticks. Unfortunately, the joysticks were out of stock and had to be backordered.<\/p>\n

I still have our family Atari 810, and I still love the unique sound it makes when reading disks. That device composed the soundtrack to my computing childhood.<\/p>\n

Price Check<\/h3>\n
    \n
  • The Atari 810 sold for US $449 from this vendor, which is equivalent to $1,114.95 in 2011 dollars. To translate, the thing was expensive. The 810 could read 88 kilobytes of data per disk side (one side at a time), which makes for a whopping $12.66 per kilobyte in today’s dollars. Right now, you can buy a 2 terabyte (~2,000,000,000 kilobyte) hard disk for $80, which works out to $.00000004 dollars per kilobyte.<\/li>\n
  • A Star Raiders<\/em> cartridge sold for $32, which is equivalent to $79.46 in 2011 dollars.<\/li>\n
  • A pair of joysticks (I assume official Atari brand) went for $15, which is equivalent to $37.25 today.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    [ From Omega Sales Co., Inc. Invoice, July 1981 ]<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n

    Discussion Topic of the Week:<\/strong> What’s the most memorable computer or video game item your parents have ever purchased for you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Atari 810 Disk Drive Receipt Thirty years ago this month, my father ordered an Atari 810 disk drive for our family’s Atari 800 from a place called “Omega Sales Co., Inc.” in Rhode Island. Thirty years ago yesterday, Omega filled out the invoice you see here and shipped the order to my dad. From the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,27,26,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-info-and-history","category-regular_features","category-retro-scan-of-the-week","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=787"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2979,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787\/revisions\/2979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}