Did a bit of tidying up yesterday and came across a couple of receipts dating back to 1990. Them were the times when I had an Amiga 500. They didn’t have a hard drive, just an in-built floppy disk drive which booted the system. I assume that the inbuilt memory acted as a RAM drive to hold the system instructions. So to load a word processing program you would have to remove the boot disk and then load the program.
With all that swapping in and out driving me around the bend I went and bought an external 3.5 inch floppy disk drive. The cost? $199. I had occasion to buy another one (internal) last year - $10.
The second receipt was for some additional memory. The Amiga came with 512KB built in, but there was a plug where a ROM unti could be added. The cost for an additional 512KB was $149. This took the total memory to 1MB. I notice that now you can get 1GB (1000MB) for about the same price. So that’s a two-thousandth reduction in the cost.
If I remember correctly that additional memory was held in place under the console with a piece of sticky tape.