Ten years ago, I decided to write a novel. It’s a long story, but for the purposes of this post, all you need to know is that the novel is called The ’86 Fix, and it’s set in 1986.
The central character is Craig Pelling. Somewhere in the plot, he travels back to 1986 to undo a decision he made as a teenager. A decision that sent him on a path to a deeply unhappy life as a middle-aged man. The device that transported him back to 1986? A Commodore 64 computer, no less.
1986 happens to be the year I turned 15.
So when his Commodore came to mind the other day, 1986 came with it.
I think about my 15-year-old self occasionally, usually with a wince. What he’d make of his middle-aged version is a question best left unasked. But sit him in front of the PC on my desk today, or hand him the phone in my pocket, and the wincing would immediately turn to awe. Complete and utter awe.
We talk a lot about inflation lately. Nobody can shut up about it. The cost of a pint, the cost of a loaf, the cost of petrol, the cost of just existing. Everyone has their own line in the song, and everyone knows the chorus.
All of it’s fair. None of it’s the whole story.
Because while we watch the cost of a weekly shop march upwards, a few of the things we take for granted have quietly gone the other way. Not a little. A lot.
Which brings me back to Craig’s Commodore.
In 1986, a Commodore 64 retailed for £199. For Craig, that’s what a time machine cost. For the rest of us, it ran Elite and Jet Set Willy, and it taught a generation that the word “syntax” existed.
Adjusted for inflation, £199 in 1986 comes out at £757 in 2026. Close enough to identical that the difference doesn’t matter.
For £757 today, you can walk into Currys and walk out with a laptop running at 4 GHz across eight cores, with 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and a screen that shows more colours than the C64 could address across its lifetime. The same money, forty years apart. The machines bear the same relationship as a Victorian shithouse and The Shard.
Take the memory alone. Craig’s Commodore 64 shipped with 64 kilobytes of RAM. My laptop has sixteen gigabytes. 250,000 times more memory, for the same money in real terms, in a machine about the same size.
The price of memory is where the maths stops making sense. In 1986, a megabyte of RAM cost roughly £140 at chip level. If the price of RAM simply tracked inflation since then and went nowhere else, the memory inside my laptop would cost around £9 million.
£9 million. Not the laptop. Just the chips.
It doesn’t. The memory in a £750 laptop probably accounts for £40 of the build. Price per megabyte has fallen by a factor of something like 200,000, while a loaf of bread has tripled. And let’s not talk about the cost of a Freddo.
The bread won the headlines. The RAM changed the world.
But it isn’t just the computers where we’ve experienced a staggering drop in cost over the years. There are entire categories of household tech that quietly collapsed in price. A few examples…
The microwave
In 1986, a mid-range microwave from Panasonic or Sharp would set you back £250. Adjusted for inflation, that’s £950 in today’s money. The thing that sits on your worktop and reheats leftovers came in at almost a grand.
Today, you can pop to Argos and pick up a microwave for £39. No worse at the job. It doesn’t heat your ready meal any differently from the Panasonic microwave in 1986. But, it’s roughly 96 per cent cheaper in real terms.
The television
A decent 22-inch colour television in 1986 cost around £350. Adjusted forward, that’s £1,330 in today’s money. For that, you got a CRT box with four channels, wood-effect casing, and tinny mono speaker.
Today, £299 gets you a 55-inch 4K Smart TV. Seven times the screen area, a picture sharp enough to count David Dickinson’s nose hairs, built in internet, and it weighs less than the packaging the 1986 one came in.
Seventy-eight per cent cheaper for something objectively superior in every respect. Craig’s mum and dad either had to save up for a year or pop down to Radio Rentals. Now, three Klarna payments of £100.
The video camera
This is where it gets daft.
A consumer camcorder in 1986, the sort everyone actually wanted to film their kids’ birthdays with, cost around £1,100. Inflation-adjusted to 2026: £4,200. Four thousand two hundred pounds, for a machine that shot thirty minutes of soft-focus colour onto a tape you labelled with a felt-tip so nobody recorded Top of The Pops over it.
Today, the phone in your pocket shoots 4K video at 60 frames a second. It came ‘free’ with your contract. Replacement cost: zero.
The mobile phone
And here’s the one that rewrites the rules.
In 1986, a Vodafone brick phone cost around £2,000. The phone itself. That’s before the £25 monthly rental, the 25p-a-minute peak call charge, the £55 connection fee, and the rule that you could only get a signal in about four postcodes. Inflation-adjusted, the handset alone comes out at £7,600 today.
Today, nobody pays for the handset. It arrives free on a contract that costs less than the 1986 monthly line rental adjusted for inflation.
But the phone isn’t just a phone. It’s also the camera, the camcorder, the calculator, the Walkman, the encyclopaedia, the map, the alarm clock, the torch, the newspaper, and even the spirit level. Every item on that list used to be a separate purchase. Every one of them used to cost money.
Fifteen-year-old me, sat in his bedroom in 1986 tapping away at his Commodore, did not own a camcorder. His parents couldn’t stretch to one. Nobody he knew owned a mobile phone, because mobile phones existed only for Yuppies with cocaine habits. The telly came from Radio Rentals on a monthly rental.
Today’s version of him, the one sitting at the laptop, has all of that. For free. In his pocket. And half of it works better than anything 1986 could dream of.
We haven’t remortgaged the house to buy a laptop. We’ve inherited something that 1986 couldn’t have afforded if it sold the car.
The money didn’t move. The value moved aisles.
As for Craig: he paid £199 for a time machine. The ’86 Fix will reveal exactly what he went back for, and what happenis if you meddle in the past.
If you fancy a weekend in 1986, The ’86 Fix is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback, or as an audiobook if you’d rather listen.