Drive Price Mystery

While digging into the history of DoubleSpace and DriveSpace, I came across a handy article about the rocky relationship between Stac Electronics and Microsoft. Only I was distracted by the bold claim (certainly claimed in very bold letters) that a 40 MB drive cost 1,200ドル in 1989. Now, I don’t have a good sense of what cost how much in the US of A in 1989, but that just did not sound right.

Sure enough, a PC Magazine article about mail-order hard disks published in the June 1989 issue showed that in 1989, a 40 MB hard disk that cost more than 500ドル was an outlier, and finding one for 399ドル was not difficult. It also seemed odd to pick a Western Digital hard disk as representative of 1989 drive prices, because although WD was a major force in disk controllers, and did sell its own hard disks after the acquisition of Tandon’s drive division, the clear market leader at the time was Seagate. Other common mass-market drive makers were MiniScribe, Priam, or Micropolis… but not Western Digital.

So where did the outrageous 1,200ドル price came from? For a moment I thought perhaps that was adjusting 1989 dollars for inflation, but even in 2021, 500ドル (not a great price for a 40 MB drive) in 1989 dollars would be the equivalent of 1,100,ドル not 1,200,ドル and the article is several years old. So it’s probably something else…

Luckily, original Tedium article links to the source of the pricing information. Unluckily, that site only returns Error 500. Okay, Wayback Machine to the rescue. And there it is, “March 1989, Western Digital 40 MB, 1,199ドル.00”, with no hint it’s an inflation-adjusted figure. But that just makes no sense! It’s far too much.

And looking at the chart, the per-megabyte price for the WD 40 MB and 20 MB drives is in fact an outlier, noticeably higher than both the following and preceding entries.

But wait—there’s another link to the real source of the pricing information. Which describes the ultimate origin thusly:

Note 56: The Technology Book 1989 (catalogue, 184 pages in colour) distributed at all Radio Shack stores in Canada in 1989. A complete copy, in excellent condition, was generously made available to me in August 1999 by Mr. John McLeod, Money Editor of the Halifax Daily News. (In The Daily News, 6 August 1999, Mr. McLeod wrote: “A colleague digging in a closet came up with a decade-old Radio Shack catalogue…”) The only date information in this catalogue is: it carried a cover date “1989” and was copyrighted in 1988. On page 178, this catalogue had two hard disk drives for sale. One priced at 899ドル.00, with 20 megabytes storage capacity, for the following computers: Tandy 1000, Tandy 3000 HL, IBM PC, or IBM compatible. The other, priced at 1199ドル.00, 40 megabytes, for Tandy 1000s/3000/4000 or IBM compatible. These Western Digital drives were sold mounted on “user-installable” cards, which plugged into the computer’s “10-inch card slot.” If memory serves, in 1989 purchasers in Nova Scotia paid a provincial sales tax of 11%, plus a federal sales tax of 7%.

Ooookay… this price was actually in Canadian dollars, not US dollars! That seems like a major goof.

Only that still doesn’t explain much. Checking the historical exchange rates, in mid-1989 it hovered around 1.15. So 1,200ドル Canadian would have been the equivalent of about 1,000ドル US dollars. That’s still far too much.

The note quoted above mentions a 11% provincial sales tax plus a federal 7% sales tax. I assume that was not included in the 1,199ドル list price, but that is only an assumption. Perhaps some readers of this blog would know? Even so, knocking another 20% off would still be too high.

The source note does helpfully mention that the price was not actually for a bare hard disk but rather for a drive “mounted on user installable card, which plugged into the computer’s 10-inch card slot”. In other words, a HardCard equivalent.

Western Digital indeed sold such things, and called them FileCard. Okay, so what we’re really looking for is WD FileCard 40 pricing.

After a quick search, all I can say is that the WD FileCard 40 clearly was not a popular product because there’s barely any mention of it. But I did find something. A summer 1989 typography magazine has an ad on page 61 which lists “Western Digital Filecard 40 (40mb, just plug it in)” at 549, presumably US dollars.

Now that is a price much more in line with expectations. A bare drive could be had for as little as 400,ドル but that was without a controller, which the FileCard included. 549ドル for an integrated all-in-one product then seems quite reasonable.

So here’s the real mystery: If a Western Digital FileCard 40 was available in 1989 for 549ドル in the United States, how did Radio Shack manage to sell a product that was almost certainly the same WD FileCard 40 for (Canadian) 1,199ドル in Canada? Even after accounting for the exchange rate, it’s almost twice the US price. What gives?

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16 Responses to Drive Price Mystery

  1. Yuhong Bao says:

    Part of the problem is that I believe hard drive prices fell fast during the 1988-1989 period.

  2. Michal Necasek says:

    Yes, but not that fast. The 1988 DISK/TREND REPORT lists the WD40ifc (FileCard 40) at 395ドル in OEM quantity pricing. The 1989 issue lists the WD40ifc at 299ドル. That’s 25% lower, which is a significant change but can’t explain the huge Canadian price.

    For comparison, here are the DISK/TREND prices for the classic Seagate 40 MB drives: in 1987, 520ドル for ST-251-1, 450ドル for the slower ST-251; in 1988, same prices as 1987; in 1989, 360ドル for ST-251-1 (the old ST-251 no longer sold). In 1990, DISK/TREND no longer reported OEM pricing due to rapid changes.

  3. zeurkous says:

    “What gives?”

    The price the folks over at RadioShack thought the customers might be
    desperate enough to pay…?

    Either that or a pricing error of some kind, methinks.

    Hardcards *are* a bit of a speciality product, after all. Not enitrely
    uncommon but clearly a hack to extend machine life.

  4. Chris M. says:

    Radio Shack was clearly selling 40MB (19ms) hard drives sans controller for 1299ドル in 1989!

    See page 5. Note that there is nothing special about the drive, clearly a bare ST-506 interface unit but with a fast seek time.

    https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/flipbook/c1989_rsc-20.html

    Whats weird is the pricing on page 9. You could get a 40MB drive with a lower seek time for much much less. Even mentions last year’s pricing for the 40MB 28ms was 1399ドル. The hard card was 799ドル.

  5. Michal Necasek says:

    Thanks for finding that. So the Radio Shack pricing was really just a rip-off. Still interesting that the part which was likely the WD FileCard 40 cost 799ドル in the US and C1,199ドル in Canada. I don’t know what was typical at the time.

    Depending on exactly what was available when, 799ドル might not be that much out of line compared to the 549ドル price seen elsewhere for the FileCard 40.

    Radio Shack also offered a decently fast SCSI 40 MB drive for 999,ドル which compared with 1,299ドル for a ST506 drive makes absolutely no sense.

  6. Richard Wells says:

    Radio Shack used to keep products in inventory at the same price for years so something that looked reasonable in 1985 would seem very overpriced in 1990. Radio Shack is the wrong place to do research on historical pricing.

  7. anr says:

    This reminds me nowadays 2TB USBs HDs costing less than a 512MB one …

  8. Jaybee says:

    @zeurkous

    I wouldn’t call a hardcard a hack to extend life. I’d call it a convenience upgrade.
    You would be adding a hard disk controller either way. But with a hardcard you don’t need to replace your full-height floppy drive with a half-height one to make room for a half-height hard drive, or route yet more ribbon cables across the case.
    (Or leave the drive laying bare behind the computer, with cables sticking out the back to connect it. I know some people that would’ve done it.)

  9. zeurkous says:

    The slot isn’t quite designed to hold it. That makes it a hack to me 🙂

    Me doesn’t contest that hacks _can_ be useful…

  10. Fernando says:

    I have no doubts that Radio Shack was pricey, but this was before NAFTA, probably there was a import tax in Canada for this type of things (there was for my country and the prices were very different to the U. S. of A.).

  11. Fernando says:

    import duty, not import tax

  12. Michal Necasek says:

    That’s where I was hoping some Canadian readers with sufficiently long memory could help — yes, the price could have had some taxes or duties included, but I don’t know if it was the case.

    But at minimum, misrepresenting a price in Canadian dollars as US dollars seems like a mistake that’s very hard to justify.

  13. zel says:

    Canadian here. In Canada, the prices as published never include tax. It’s enough of a ‘gotcha’ that books for tourists mention it, and it often has to be explained to American tourists bewildered by prices often being 10-20% higher than marked. As an additional bonus, in most provinces there’s a litany of weird exceptions. For example, in my province, restaurant food other than [soda] pop is exempt from the provincial sales tax, but is taxed federally. And some things deliberately have the taxes partially obfuscated – if you go to buy tobacco or liquor, you still pay the sales taxes on them, but the sticker price includes built in excise tax, called ‘sin tax’ by the locals; this is probably because those taxes are often between 30 and 100% of the cost of the goods so building it in makes people less likely to rage.

  14. Michal Necasek says:

    OK, so the hard disk price listed would be without tax, right? Which means it was even more expensive to buy. But as other posters explained, that is probably something to be primarily chalked up to Radio Shack’s pricing policy, not prices in Canada being generally vastly higher than in the US. At any rate, a very misleading data point used (perhaps unknowingly) in the referenced article.

    BTW I’d definitely expect European tourists to be confused, but Americans less so. Prices in the US are also always listed with no sales tax, because it is so wildly variable. However, 9% counts as very high sales tax, and typically it’s around 5% which is a lot easier to ignore than 20%.

    The VAT/sales/whatever tax rules tend to be similarly complex in Europe, but are typically country-wide. They’re also high enough (often around 20%) that vendors are not allowed to advertise the prices without tax. Or if an item can be sold without tax (to business customers), the price must be very clearly marked as such.

  15. Robert Lipe says:

    Actually, I was with Tandy Business Products in that era and somewhere have nearly pristine copies of the U.S. catalogues from the ’87-’91 range from when I worked there. There were three classes of HDs for the PC-ish systems in that era (I can play II/12/16 trivial pursuit if you’re down…) and you’re right that while Tandy modified some firmware here and there and was careful to qualify only configurations that could be made to work (with appropriate power supplies, cooling, needed BIOS and OS mods, etc.) none of those were built in-house.

    Catalogs were indeed printed once a year for the retail side, but the computer side was moving fast enough there was often a late-spring revision to it and while sometimes products would be on ‘permanent sale’ between catalog revisions, the prices were officially what the catalogs said they were, so there was a bit of sawtooth of price parity that would go longer as the year went on and industry prices dropped and then…the new catalog, just in time for the holidays!

    At the low end was the Hard Cards. These made sense for the Tandy 1000’s as they were using an 8-bit controller that fit the puny little 10″ slots and a small HD (3 1/2″?) attached to the card with rails that took an end slot because it was so tall it would block adjacent slots. Since those were glorified PC Jrs with 8088s and no 16-bit busses, the controller on these had to include the code that would hook the PC BIOS for interrupt 13h. (IIRC, the BIOS would scan address space between the motherboard video card (0xa000:0) and 0xffff:0 for a “run me” signature that would make a long jump to run code on the embedded ROM (flash? ya, right. LOL) that would add itself to the BIOS call chain. I think they were 3 1/2″ drives and if the 8-bit controller wasn’t bad enough, the seek time on them was something atrocious like 85mS. These were … a definite upgrade from floppies and that’s about all nice that I can say about that. 🙂

    Getting into real computersTM, we had the Tandy 1200 (an XT clone), the 3000 (a 286/AT workalike) and later 4000 (Deskpro 386/16 and with the even later 4000LX, 386/20) machines paired normal WD 1007 (?) controllers or an Adaptec 1540 for the SCSI versions. (We’ll politely leave the MCA Tandy 5000MC out of this.) There were two distinct families of HDs for them.

    In the middle were the noisy, slow ones that really only ever made sense for a single-user system. They used stepper motors and were probably Seagate ST-225s or 241s that roamed the earth in that era. Depending on the exact model, seek times were in the 40-65mS range.

    For the multiuser systems – and our group sold these by the literal truckloads – running XENIX or 3Com servers, those 40mS seeks were just never going to do because you couldn’t afford enough memory to keep the devices from swapping (paging) their butts off which, of course, played hell on the drive’s OTHER duty of actual disk I/O. (This is also why having root + swap on one 20MB HD + /usr and app data on the other was sometimes better than having a single 40MB HD.) These traded stepper motors for voice coils (sometimes, one entire platter was dedicated to landing the head ON the track since it was more of an analog-ish glide) and thus the seek times for these were in the low 20’s and high teens as I recall. IIRC, they were much closer to a 1:1 interleave and you didn’t have to format them like a hopskotch court just so the HD didn’t have to wait for the platter to come back around again.

    We never called them this in front of customers, but this is why we had a “fast 40” and a “slow 40” in the product line and if you even THOUGHT about configuring a XENIX system with a stepper motor configuration, you would be banished to selling VCRs for a week. Even if you could make it work (and the controller knew the difference, but the host OS didn’t, IIRC) it was not a supported configuration and really was doing your customer a disservice. The difference in sound was the difference between trying to shift without clutching and a light static hiss from the other.

    It’s easy to forget – if you ever knew it – that Radio Shack of that era had different classes of stores that were allowed/forced to sell different classes of products. An X or Y store couldn’t stock or sell anything above the home class machines. This is why some people think that RS only sold alarm clocks, diodes, vcr cables, “alligator clips”, and Tandy 1000’s. A Z store could inventory, deploy, and support things like the 3000 and 4000 on these advanced OSes that took more than a PC Magazine knowledge of DOS to make work well as they had one dedicated person (that was my entry role) and access to a regional beehive of actual experts at the regional training and support centers (including me, later) that memorized BIOS versions, carried EPROMs in our briefcases, build databases, had accounting knowledge (not me, but by golly I was one of the few that could make a printer work reliably on XENIX), that had phone numbers and names in engineering, and was generally capable of actually supporting “real computers”. It made sense that the inexpensive home computers (The 1000 family) had better sound and graphics than a 3000/4000 XENIX console ever needed, but they needed better I/O systems.

    Tandy Business Products/Radio Shack of that era was more than the “how can I record one channel while watching another” people. Honest 🙂 But by even the early 90’s, it was pretty to see that Dell, Acer, Compaq, and others could lap us and the TBP division was pretty much dismantled while the home computer market ambled on for another few years.

    The HD’s for the 2/12/16/6000 line (Z-80/68k) were all full-height drives of a totally different lineage, almost always in external enclosures. We weren’t selling many by this era, but we had many hundreds of small businesses all over the region that were running their accounting or video rental shops or whatever on them.

    From this point of history, we can see those prices and think they were outrageous, but it actually WAS a valid product segmentation strategy. A 2,000ドル hard drive for a 999ドル Tandy 1000SX made no sense, but it similarly didn’t make sense to put five 8-port intelligent serial boards in a XENIX system (43 people – we also loaded up COM1, COM2, and the physical console! 🙂 and have the system essentially paralyzed with drive activity that was waiting all the time because you saved several hundred bucks (and it was several hundred between the 40’s, IIRC) on a wimpy HD.

    I moved to Nashville for that TSC job and, after much ranting and raving about driver issues about the SCO drivers for the “good” multiport boards were were selling, eventually took a job on the other side of town at the company that made those. I eventually became the Sr. Driver Dude and after several years of THAT, took a job at SCO to be a Sr. Kernel Engineer with them. So I stayed close to this level of hardware trivia for a long time.

    Signed,
    Former Manager RS 01-6476Z
    ..and I can’t remember the TSC number, but I was …!tandy!r06(digitdigit)!robertl when UUCP was just how mail worked.

  16. Michal Necasek says:

    This is super interesting, thank you!

    It did not occur to me that the catalogs would be published on a yearly schedule, which was fine for almost everything but not computer products. That clarifies a lot.

    Tiny addition, at least some HardCards used a form factor that was similar to 3.5″ but not quite, IIRC the platters were slightly larger.

    Dedicated servo surfaces were the trademark of CDC drives. I’d be almost surprised if Tandy didn’t ship any of the Wren family drives. Those were the good performers.

    Do you happen to know where to find some information about the history and tech of multiport serial board? They must have been a pretty big business, and I know there was a bunch of companies making them, but finding out much about them is quite difficult nowadays.

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