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Depends on what you define as basic, but that price point was always the absolute top of the high end for PCs (albeit not for e.g. UNIX workstations). In my fi
by ido 7y ago
Depends on what you define as basic, but that price point was always the absolute top of the high end for PCs (albeit not for e.g. UNIX workstations).
In my first job (in 2001) some expensive piece of equipment was controlled by a compaq deskpro 386 with a proprietary ISA card + some hardware dongle that only worked on old computers running DOS (wouldn't work on Win9x DOS).
My boss at the time told me they spent $10k on that computer alone when they bought it in the 80s but that replacing the equipment it was controlling would cost upwards of a million $, so we had to keep that old PC alive.
- ghaff 7y agoI'm mostly talking quite a while before that. When I bought my first IBM PC clone in the early 80s, it was probably $3K or something like that and it didn't even have a hard drive. (I bought a 5MB hard drive with company money around the same time and it was $5K all by itself.)
- Gibbon1 7y agoI think the general idea was right, except I would put the price at $2500-3000 as the sweet spot. Back then if you spent $5000 on a system you'd be able to buy it for 2/3 that price in six months to a year. Anything less than $1500-2000 was near obsolete.