To be honest, I got in touch with the Apple II series pretty late when I got myself a IIGS in 1999.

Not that I didn’t knew/saw them back in the days (~1983)… actually I rode my bike quite a distance to regularly visit the biggest Apple dealer in town. But all I did was stare at the exorbitantly expensive “personal computers”.  And they had it all – IIe, ProDrive and the 1MB expansion card…even the brand new //c, which I adored.

By accident I stumbled across this receipt in the web which is from the mentioned Apple dealer. It gives you an idea how far an Apple II was from a 13 year old boys reality…

An Apple II+, a disk drive, mono screen and an Epson MX80 printer would have set you back 6.735 German Marks.
A 2nd drive was an extra 1240 Marks. Additional 16K RAM: A whapping 495 Marks. And 245 Marks for enhancing the keyboard for lower-caps entry… so a full blows set would end at 8470 Marks.
For comparison, in 1981 a Volkswagen Golf (“Rabbit” in the US) would start at 11.780 Marks.