I was also very young and did not have a good enough grasp on money yet, but for us, in Germany, I remember the 1541 disk drive for the Commodore not being cheap, but still everyone I knew with a C64 got one, so the cost must not have been too prohibitive. The "Datasette" tape drive was much cheaper as I recall, but because of the disk drive's propensity I only knew one person who had it (and probably barely used it).
Depended a lot on the region I guess. I hear that in Britain for some reason the tape decks were much more common. But Britain kind of got an "alternative history" of home computing anyway, owed largely due to their computer literacy program and (partly) resulting British micro industry. Many of those products barely made it to the continent, some not at all, so it's hard to compare.
Ah, I was too young for multiple drives. While my parents probably saw the futility of not having a disk drive at all, shelling out the hundreds of DM for a second one was likely too much.
And with no own money I put up with what I had. I nowadays suspect that the grease in my then rather old 1541 must have hardened, because it needed the occasional hard slap on its case to continue loading, it would "hang" in the middle of a disk access until you did that.
Depended a lot on the region I guess. I hear that in Britain for some reason the tape decks were much more common. But Britain kind of got an "alternative history" of home computing anyway, owed largely due to their computer literacy program and (partly) resulting British micro industry. Many of those products barely made it to the continent, some not at all, so it's hard to compare.