That’s gotta be fake, yeah? Cuz you could get a Mac Plus or SE for a third that price back then. I remember my brother being able to afford a MacPlus on first release and he didn’t have some high paying job.

Yeah, 386s started to get affordable in the early 90s – I remember at university in 1992 all my friends with financially stable parents were buying Osborne 386 packages (around the 33MHz mark as I recall) for a few thousand. Three years earlier, I can believe the 386 was bleedin edge and therefore very very expensive.

It may not be fake, but it’s not “real” either; a Mac II in 1987 WITH a 20MB hard drive running at 16Mhz was “only” $5500 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_II), and there’s no way a Tandy was ever more than a Mac. In any case, notice something? No dollar signs. This site ( www.johnpap.net/not-en/ypoEnArxh/RadioShackTandy5000MC.htm ) mentions that the ad came from a South African magazine. In 1990, one dollar bought you 2.5 Rand, so the price in dollars was around $3400. Add the fact computer hardware was already marked up when sold overseas, the price for this computer at that time in the U.S. was probably between $2500 and $3000. Nobody ever paid US$8500 for this system.