Cool article!
If any of you know how to get a message into Mike Strietbeck, do let him know the prices he quoted in the article are missing the decimal point. For instance, he notes that the price dropped from 3100 to 2500. That's not thousands of dollars, or even hundreds, but $25 and $31. In the ads, there is a gap between the dollars and cents figures, but no decimal point, and that's where he went wrong - it's understood that the price is $25.00.
As an example - the inflation calculator gives the equivalent value of $31 in 1865 as $1,091.71 today.