I remember waking up to the sign-off drone plenty of times. I loved it when it was on the old Indian head or the target, somethign like that. But toward the end, it was just vertical stripes of obnoxious colors. Maybe I'd fallen asleep in my Nth watching of "The Big Sleep." I loved the crap-shoot of old movies on late-night TV. The wierd thing is while I saw "The Big Sleep" literally about 100 times over my late-night TV-sneaking youth, I still regularly watch and love that movie.
But hey, I remember when an Apple III computer cost about $4,000 and was treated with such respect in the office that few dared to approach it. It had big green screen square lettering on the screen. I think you could play pong on it, but don't recall exactly. Four thousand dollars, in the early '80s. Five years later, that fancy computer wasn't worth fifty bucks.
Those prices dropped fast
I do remember seeing an external CD burner once costing nearly a grand. Now every old computer has one.