If you are a child of the '70s, chances are you remember when gas stations around the country were in a quandary centered around a key piece of their everyday equipment. The fuel pump price indicator.

Remember, when many station owners went out with a piece of tape and put the number one up before the price per gallon? It was a stark indicator that things were about to get REAL with the price of gas.

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I remember Wayne, at the Conoco in Kennebec standing with a calculator in hand, ready to calculate the dollar amount of gas I just dumped into Dad's pickup.

That pain, at the pump, was real. Especially for the gas stations. They replaced pumps and installed new equipment.

I just got off the phone with my son Jake, who drives a truck. He said he filled up the truck yesterday. He mentioned that he put $960 worth of diesel in a truck yesterday. Here's where it gets interesting. He said, the pumps only go up to $999.99.

Today's price for diesel was $4.95 here in Sioux Falls today. That price won't have to go up much more before truck drivers will have to stop pumping, finish their transaction, then card up again and finish filling.

Oh, there is good news though. While they're standing there pouring fuel they get the opportunity to watch the whole feed. You know the one that touts a hotdog for sale inside the store.

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

 

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