...and whatever brand I might be forgetting were basically the first front-wheel-drive Opel Ascona / Vauxhall Cavalier in American. (Which was, perhaps somewhat ironically, the last generation of the Ascona; the next was called Vectra. Nowadays the Cavalier is too, AFAIK.)

So, ~17 percent (one sixth) of the price of a respectable-albeit-boring (lower?) middle-class car; say, a Ford Fusion[1]. What's that sell for; $25-30,000? So, uhm... ~$4,250-5,100.[2] Whew, quite the respectable chunk of cash.

The fanfold paper was great, BTW: You could sketch out quite long program listings on the backside of old printouts. I kind of miss that.

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[1]: Can't recall what GM's current equivalents of the Vectra are called, but the Fusion is the most exact correspondent from the Blue Oval, AFAICS: It's the American version of the Euro-Ford Mondeo, which is the successor to the Sierra and Taunus, which were the pretty much exact equivalents to the Vectra and Ascona.

[2]: Note for Peter: Much easier to calculate as 25% and 30%, respectively, of $17,000.