I think he picked a good number. It clearly wasn't $1000 of effort. Jim may not have been interested in hiring someone who, like his previous software guy, was looking to shake him down for as much as possible.

I agree. Anything higher and he might have got paid, but not got offered the job.

The fact he DID get the job means he got the better deal in the long run.

And that job was worth, in today's money, roughly $1100 a week, which for a summer job before college is pretty damn good.

$100 in 1982 is about $275 today. $1k ($2.75k today) feels high to me because of the combination of unknown teenager and the fact that programmer pay was relatively lower in 1982. And if you scale that up to $4k per week that’s $11k per week in today’s money which feels pretty crazy for a teenager. $400 per week in 1982 is a salary of like $60k in today’s money. At 20 hours per week that sounds like a good deal.

> And if you scale that up to $4k per week that’s $11k per week in today’s money which feels pretty crazy for a teenager.

Maybe that's because minimum wage did not scale to match inflation since 1982. If it had, I don't think $11k would sound as crazy.

In the late 1980s I did computer work for a small business and was paid about $9/hr. It wasn't really programming though, more of an operator job with some hardware maintenance/troubleshooting mixed in as needed. My first job as a programmer, in the early 1990s, paid $32k base plus overtime and a yearly bonus.

> Would $1,000 (in 1982 money) have been too much?

To compare some prices:

In 1983 Lotus 1-2-3 was selling for $495, which is about $1320 today.

In 1988 CompuServe was charge $11 (so, over $20 today) an hour.

In 1983 an IBM 5150 was between $1565 and $3000 ($4200 and $8000). http://www.oldcomputers.net/ibm5150.html

The computer itself probably cost $60,000 new, so $1,000 for a software fix wouldn't have been outrageous.