10 ms·

The high cost of software in the 1980s (2019)

65 points by zdw 5y ago

flohofwoe 5y ago
That's why DLC, microtransactions and ingame payments were invented. Today the 60 dollars are just the symbolic entry fee to the ingame shop ;) (but for some niche genres this model works really well both for developers and users, high fidelity flight simulators for instance where aircraft are sold as DLC modules)
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time (of the article, not the software): The high cost of software in the 1980s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20988512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20988512 - Sept 2019 (11 comments)
azinman2 5y ago
When you’re going to sell low numbers of units you gotta make it up in cost.
AlbertCory 5y ago
dang's reference doesn't seem to cover Lotus 1-2-3 ($499) or dBase II ($700) (or was it dBase III?) I vividly remember, in the early 80s, a guy who's now a successful VC telling me that there was no reason why software should cost more than a college textbook. This was radical at the time; now of course textbooks are much more expensive if you want to actually buy them.
- laurent92 5y ago
  Even when Apple launched the iPhone appstore. Software used to cost $50 for shareware, $600 for MS Office, probably $2k for Delphi or Visual Basic. There was no way one would survive with apps at $1 or $2! There still isn’t, but we have many apps.
  - pm90 5y ago
    We have a lot more paid users. A full 100 million more Americans, and even more in the rest of the developed world. And nearly everyone in the developed world has a smartphone.
  - bodhiandphysics 5y ago
    Delphi and vb were crazy cheap. Vb cost 200 bucks. Delphi could be had for 50. It’s one of the reasons for their incredible success.
    - robocat 5y ago
      I don’t remember Delphi ever being cheap, although you could perhaps get academic versions or gimped personal editions. About Delphi 2 released 1996: “List price is $2000 for the Client/Server Suite, $500 for the Desktop version, and $800 for the Developer version. Street prices are usually about half the list price, and upgrade prices are even better. Support options are described the Supportability section of this review.” — https://www.thekompany.com/review-of-delphi-2-from-borland/ https://www.thekompany.com/review-of-delphi-2-from-borland/ Prices went up from there over the years, and Embarcadero are now acting more like Oracle when it comes to trying to enforce their rules (I had a friend get an incredibly rude and nasty call from Embarcadero, regardless that he was a super fan, and he had already been paying many thousands to be fully licensed. I have never personally seen a professional company treat a paying professional client so poorly - seriously avoid Embarcadero.)
      - bodhiandphysics 5y ago
        You’re right... I’m remembering wrong. However vb was incredibly cheap
- ghaff 5y ago
  A lot of productivity/business software was in the hundreds of dollars. It was pretty radical Turbo Pascal from Borland was priced at only about $50--which is still getting close to $100 in today's money, given that most compilers, etc. were $300+. As the article suggests, pretty much anything you bought in a store was going to be in the $50 range although there was cheaper shareware (which the majority didn't pay for) and freeware.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  A further note: I worked on Reflex (by Analytica). That product bombed at $495, which was a price set in envy of Lotus. The company went under and got bought by Borland for pocket change. Phillippe cut the price to $100 (still a lot in today's dollars), sold it by mail order, and made it a best seller.
klelatti 5y ago
- Smaller market so fewer sales to spread fixed costs over - Some of this software was novel so little or no competition
- laurent92 5y ago
  - Bad methods. Waterfall. Lack of pivoting.
  - trimbo 5y ago
    I'm interested to know how one should quickly pivot software written in 6502 assembly and physically distributed in retail stores.
    - simonh 5y ago
      You can’t, so they didn’t, so software was expensive.
bodhiandphysics 5y ago
Also note diskettes were very expensive!!
- ghaff 5y ago
  When I was in business school in the 1980s, I had a small side business selling students the floppy diskettes they needed for the PCs in the new computer lab. (Very few owned their own computers although I did.) I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think the campus store sold them for about $10 each. I bought off-brand in bulk and sold them for at least a 50% discount (with free replacement guarantee) while still making something like a 3x markup.
bodhiandphysics 5y ago
Also pro software is still very expensive. A seat of maya costs 2000 a year. Solid works cost 3500 for a license. Matlab costs 2 grand. Microsoft’s compiler products weren’t particularly expensive ( and were much much cheaper than say a small talk seat)
- _delirium 5y ago
  Adobe is up there too, $1k per seat per year for a business license of Creative Cloud.
- auxym 5y ago
  I worked at a place that was paying almost 20K CAD per seat per year for CATIA and some add-ons (PDM, FEA, etc). I hear ANSYS, if you get a few products, quickly runs up in that range also.
  - bodhiandphysics 5y ago
    Catia and Ansys are crazy expensive.. though my boss is buying me an 8000 dollar gpu so... basically differential equations are expensive
- igouy 5y ago
  March 7, 1988 — "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95, the company said. Registered users of Digitalk's Smalltalk/V can upgrade for $75 until June 1." https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&ots=jiXJNN0ii3&dq=digitalk%20v%2F286&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q=digitalk%20v/286&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&ots=...
zeteo 5y ago
The production cost was high since they wrote it directly in assembly and/or C and used very few external libraries. It was code golfing everyday and you couldn't afford many bugs since rolling out patches was a huge pain. So you truly needed rockstar programmers to pull it off. (The closest equivalent today would be custom embedded firmware - not cheap.) In terms of value, I'm pretty sure 30 years from now they'll laugh at the quality of today's UI and what we pay for it. For the time they had quite adequate graphics considering they were competing with arcade games and playing cards. Also IIRC they ran pretty fast on less hardware than you get in a coffee machine today.
DanBC 5y ago
See also online access being very expensive. Compuserve, charging $11 per hour ($25 per hour in 2021 dollars), had "more than 250,000 subscribers". The Source, charging $8 per hour, was popular for its conferencing system "parti". Delphi, charging $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users) following. BIX, $9 per hour, grew from a magazine. Notable quote: "This is the computer industry as it used to be: people sharing ideas and solutions without the greed and grit with associated with today's corporate driven, litigation-laced, industry" From the Whole Earth Catalogue "Signal - Communication tools for the Information Age" (http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1300 http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1...)
- ghaff 5y ago
  And don't forget the telephone charges. Even if you weren't dialing a different area code, calling further than your local exchange or set of exchanges could be >$1/minute. (Indeed, intrastate calls could cost more than interstate calls.) So there were a bunch of apps for both commercial services and BBS systems to let you get on, download messages, and get offline as quickly as possible. You then could read/reply to messages offline and log back on just to upload them.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  PCPursuit! or better yet ungaurded university or business modem pools
h2odragon 5y ago
It was easier to price software that high when people had invested so heavily in the computer already. When the computer was $3,000; another $300 for a BASIC compiler was easier to swallow (especially given there were few alternatives and none free). I was involved in one company in the mid 80s that sold most of its units of a niche software package in combination with a full system, printer, etc. Most of our customers didn't have a computer or if they did wanted another as a dedicated tool to run our software... Which was essentially some spreadsheets and a friendly menu system. $1,900 for the software or $4k to $8k for various hardware packages with it, as i recall.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  Maybe it was also because people were closer to understanding how things work? I often came across the mindset, that people already payed so much for their computer - so now they feel the software they need, should be included and are unwilling to spend more money because in their mind it goes together. (although I think, that assumption got less over the years)
- conductr 5y ago
  > When the computer was $3,000; another $300 for a BASIC compiler was easier to swallow It’s funny to me but I almost feel like computers were a pyramid scheme in the 80s “You should get a computer for home“ “Really? What can I do with it?” “Run compilers and some business software” “I don’t need business software at home, what’s a compiler?” “It helps you build software. It’s like learning a foreign language” “Oh, I see. So, I buy the computer, then buy software, to make more software which sounds very difficult” “Exactly!” “How much?” “Roughly a Ford Mustang” “Let’s do it”
  - ghaff 5y ago
    You can find quite a few pieces from that era gently poking fun at home PCs and the available software and utility. This is a really funny one from the New Yorker: https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2005/04/29/man-bytes-dog-by-james-gorman/ https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2005/04/29/man-bytes-dog-by-jam... There's a book which I could probably find if I were at home that had a piece going into the limitations of spreadsheets, accounting software, etc. that was also hilarious.
macdice 5y ago
Some time in the early-ish 90s when I was a student I worked at a tiny place doing software development, targeting various commercial Unixes. Development was done on a lowly 486 running some variant of SCO System V UNIX, and I vaguely recall that the cost of licensing the system with compilers was thousands of dollars (you had to pay a lot of money for each little feature of the OS too, like TCP, SMP, ...). Or it would have been, if it hadn't been for some guys at the little ISP next door who gave us a copy of GCC, which was a gateway to running Slackware Linux, which was pretty soon where all future development was done before transferring it over to customers' HPUX boxes or whatever. I was just a kid catching the tail end of all that, but there are still a couple of hard-to-get-your-hands-on big iron Unixes like that; I've worked on most of them (ie those and many that are gone), and I must say it's surprising to me that, by now, you still can't just download an ISO and run it on qemu or whatever (actually you can, but it's probably illegal). I could forget about them entirely, if I didn't have to keep the open source stuff I work on working on them too, with limited access and no CI...
- anthk 5y ago
  Getting Slackware from cdrom.com was a bargain.
anthk 5y ago
"Adventure" for $30, that's a steal. If should've cost as much as $6 ase game was free as in freedoom.
andai 5y ago
Can anyone comment on how the price of programmers has changed over time?
- ghaff 5y ago
  Like many things, I'm sure the answer is "it depends" on the skill sets and location--and I'm sure the situation is even more confused when commercial computing was very new. But my impression from working in the computer systems space was that there was not a real salary distinction between the electrical engineers and the software people in the 80s through early to mid-90s. And California did not generally offer a sufficient premium to cover CoL at the time. [ADDED: At least this was my experience as a Boston-area person who was recruited by some West Coast companies. One reason I stayed put.] And, oh, you almost certainly needed a CS or at least an engineering degree.
harikb 5y ago
Some of the software in the list should be compared with "enterprise software sales". $335 for a ledger software isn't bad when you think it is bought by a company/business. Moreover, there was a certain amount of hand-holding, service & support implied with sales in those days. If you want to talk of rip-offs, in early 90s, I bought a casio organizer with my hard earned $35 only to realize the connectivity cable+software to a PC costs $150+ more
jdminhbg 5y ago
A common sentiment on HN (and other programming-centric communities) is nostalgia for early computing days, and specifically, how easy it was to become a programmer. You turned on your Commodore and it booted into a BASIC prompt, for example. No webpack/babel/toolchain nightmare between you and making a computer do things. But as someone who started programming as a kid in the late 80s/early 90s, I think this nostalgia vastly understates how many barriers existed between enjoying doing things in BASIC and moving forward to different levels or paradigms of programming. I was made vaguely aware of the existence of C by computing magazines, but the idea of actually buying a C compiler was totally out of the question. My high school had Pascal available, but nothing else. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 90s that the internet and open source evolved to the point where programming languages and tools became ubiquitous to the point where you stopped thinking about how you might acquire them.
- harikb 5y ago
  On the other hand, lack of internet allowed one to "borrow" (pirate) software from a friend who had it. No sign in required to ones Jetbrains account.
- cube00 5y ago
  I remember wanting to create Windows applications but couldn't because Visual Studio (or Visual Basic) was so expensive. The only "free" alternative was to code it in assembly[1] which wasn't exactly easy beyond "Hello World" [1] https://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm https://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm
  - jdminhbg 5y ago
    Yes. Even once I was in college in the late 90s, to get my own copy of Visual Studio was hundreds of dollars — discounted in the university book store for students from full retail, but still prohibitive for a college student.
- ghaff 5y ago
  To put some numbers to it, I bought a computer in the early 80s. No hard disk but it was still probably about $4K or so by the time you threw in a dot matrix printer and any other hardware, e.g. modem. I was actually working at the time but, as an engineer, my salary was about $25K. A PC clone was a significant investment. By the late 90s, I was in tech (as a product manager) and was making about double that. But a hard disk drive was still in the thousands of dollars and a compiler/assembler/debugger was still in the many hundreds of dollars range. And probably spend another few hundred on books because that's mostly what you needed if you wanted to look things up. Some of this you could copy of course. (Though the software came with a shelf full of manuals you sort of needed.) But you were still easily looking at a $10K+ investment in today's dollars to get into "serious" programming on your own. ADDED: There were ways to cut the costs of software especially but still a lot of money.
mikewarot 5y ago
Turbo Pascal was priced at $50 when it was introduced, and it just kept getting better with each new version. This was back when PCs were thousands of dollars for the lower end models. The price has to cover the costs, profits for all stages of the retail chain, spread across the market size. Consider the cost of Facebook's software, their sunk developer costs must be on the order of a Billion dollars. It's likely the same for all of the FAANGs. It would be interesting to estimate a price for all the work that has gone into the Linux ecosystem.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Keep in mind that the Linux Foundation has an incentive to come up with a large number. Still, this is over 10 years old and suggests $1 billion for the Linux kernel and over $10 billion for all the software in a Linux distribution: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/linux-foundation-publishes-study-estimating-the-value-of-linux/ https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/linux-foundati... And of course Facebook et al. is building on top of a lot of that open source development.
Animats 5y ago
Yes. Working for an aerospace company, we bought commercial software at commercial prices in the early 1980s. An Ada compiler for VAXen was $40,000. Interleaf, which was like Microsoft Word, was originally $60,000, and came with four Sun workstations and a laser printer. Getting a copy without buying hardware took negotiation, and was still over $1000 per copy. We had a formal license for UNIX for VAXen. We got that free, because the aerospace company and AT&T had a cross licensing agreement. The free license was a formal document that arrived with the embossed corporate seals of both companies. I made a copy and put it on the side of the CPU, while Legal kept the original. With that in hand, we could then run 4.1 BSD.
- earthscienceman 5y ago
  When I read this it made me realize just how "competitive" FOSS was in this type of landscape. I'm young enough, FOSS was mostly a moral/philosophical paradigm... not a comparison between open software and software that was thousands to license.
  - Animats 5y ago
    Yes. On PCs, things like C cross-compilers for microcontrollers were very expensive, because the market was tiny. A C compiler targeting the 68HC11, a small microcontroller, was expensive enough in 1987 that I used Forth instead. And that wasn't free. I bought Walter Bright's Zortec C++ compiler for Windows in the 1990s, and I think it was about US$400.
xqcgrek2 5y ago
Don't Copy That Floppy! (as the saying goes....but many kids did...) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-M7FJKfR7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-M7FJKfR7k
- jiveturkey 5y ago
  05:15 It takes from fifteen hundred to two thousand hours to create a piece of quality software 12:30 Captain Crunch
ThinkBeat 5y ago
(I am not a gamer). To play the game you need a computer ALIENWARE AURORA RYZEN™ EDITION R14 about $5K (with Win11) Alienware 38 Curved Gaming Monitor about $1.5K Keyboard, mouse, chair, speakers tc $2K. That is 8.5K for just the computer. Look up prices just now I guess you can pay about $150 for a fancy edition of Far Cry 6 (converted from Norwegian prices), and then you can spend spend spend on DLC or whatever it is called. At least back then you you got the entire game when you bought it. Yeah I know you can buy a much much cheaper computer and monitor and everything else. But if you were a nerd who owned a computer to play games back then, you might be a huge esports dude now who needs leet gear now.
borp9 5y ago
The article dwells on game graphics, which don't meet modern expectations. But what people were paying for was gameplay.
- ghaff 5y ago
  As I recall, Infocom text adventures were priced at about the same price as the graphical games of the period. (But I was a beta tester and got them for free :-))
zabzonk 5y ago
Well, some cheap compilers (this is about 1984): - I got C for free on the first Unix systems the polytechnic I was working for bought - a desktop, but still a multi-user system. We had it connected to VT100 compatible terminals via the poly's WAN that anyone could connect to. - Desmet C on the IBM PC. I can't remember the exact price, but much less than 100 GBP, otherwise I couldn't have wangled the expense. - A C compiler on the Atari 512. It can't have been expensive, as after buying the hardware, I couldn't have afforded it! - Small C. Completely free, as I remember it. - Borland Pascal, also cheap. Of course, I think things are much better today with the likes of GCC.
- ghaff 5y ago
  >Desmet C I don't remember the price but it was probably something like $50 in the early 80s. Certainly far cheaper than the Microsoft C compiler. As I recall it had quite a few quirks though. Turbo Pascal was quite the innovation when it came out. I had a copy but never really got into it though. I don't remember the sequence but I was probably was into assembly by then and likely got Turbo C when it came out a few years later. I was in grad school for a couple years in there and wasn't doing much programming at the time. Still, none of this was especially cheap compared to free as in beer/speech today.
  - zabzonk 5y ago
    > none of this was especially cheap compared to free as in beer/speech today Of course, but I was really pleased to get my boss to shell out for quite a good (at the time) C compiler! A couple (or something like that, maybe three) of years later, when I was working at the BBC, I got another boss to buy the Zortech C++ compiler, which really launched my career as a C++ programmer, although I had tried to use the E edition of C++ earlier, but found the installation on our Unix box too difficult.
ineedasername 5y ago
For context though, an Apple III started at about $4k, $13k in today's dollars. The type of computer that could run at least some of this software could only be purchased by people who either really needed it, or had disposable income. Either way, if you can carve out $13k for the computer, an extra few hundred $ in software was a relatively small incremental cost.
m0zg 5y ago
Meanwhile 100% of the software in the developing world was "free" at the time, and moreover it was difficult to buy software even if you wanted to pay for it. People would think you're not all right in the head or something, since you could buy a CD with $20K worth of software for less than a buck. I bet 90% of commercial software is "free" there in the same way even now, modulo the CDs. The somewhat non-obvious side effect of this is it's much harder for FOSS to get traction, unfortunately, even when it's objectively a better choice.
France_is_bacon 5y ago
Dude....this is not how it was. It was much less expensive. There was so much cracked software in those days. Security was so much worse.
Jensson 5y ago
At the time you paid to be a part of the computer revolution, Moore's law was at its peak no sign of stopping as the effect of commercial microchips had just started to kick in and home computers got exponentially cheaper by the year. Products were expensive, but it didn't matter as whoever mastered this new technology would go on to rule in the future when costs came down and the economics of scale kicks in for software.
admin786 5y ago
Thankss
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
some previous dicussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20988512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20988512

65 points by zdw 5y ago

That's why DLC, microtransactions and ingame payments were invented. Today the 60 dollars are just the symbolic entry fee to the ingame shop ;) (but for some niche genres this model works really well both for developers and users, high fidelity flight simulators for instance where aircraft are sold as DLC modules)

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time (of the article, not the software): The high cost of software in the 1980s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20988512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20988512 - Sept 2019 (11 comments)

azinman2 5y ago

When you’re going to sell low numbers of units you gotta make it up in cost.

AlbertCory 5y ago

dang's reference doesn't seem to cover Lotus 1-2-3 ($499) or dBase II ($700) (or was it dBase III?) I vividly remember, in the early 80s, a guy who's now a successful VC telling me that there was no reason why software should cost more than a college textbook. This was radical at the time; now of course textbooks are much more expensive if you want to actually buy them.

laurent92 5y ago
Even when Apple launched the iPhone appstore. Software used to cost $50 for shareware, $600 for MS Office, probably $2k for Delphi or Visual Basic. There was no way one would survive with apps at $1 or $2! There still isn’t, but we have many apps.
- pm90 5y ago
  We have a lot more paid users. A full 100 million more Americans, and even more in the rest of the developed world. And nearly everyone in the developed world has a smartphone.
- bodhiandphysics 5y ago
  Delphi and vb were crazy cheap. Vb cost 200 bucks. Delphi could be had for 50. It’s one of the reasons for their incredible success.
  - robocat 5y ago
    I don’t remember Delphi ever being cheap, although you could perhaps get academic versions or gimped personal editions. About Delphi 2 released 1996: “List price is $2000 for the Client/Server Suite, $500 for the Desktop version, and $800 for the Developer version. Street prices are usually about half the list price, and upgrade prices are even better. Support options are described the Supportability section of this review.” — https://www.thekompany.com/review-of-delphi-2-from-borland/ https://www.thekompany.com/review-of-delphi-2-from-borland/ Prices went up from there over the years, and Embarcadero are now acting more like Oracle when it comes to trying to enforce their rules (I had a friend get an incredibly rude and nasty call from Embarcadero, regardless that he was a super fan, and he had already been paying many thousands to be fully licensed. I have never personally seen a professional company treat a paying professional client so poorly - seriously avoid Embarcadero.)
    - bodhiandphysics 5y ago
      You’re right... I’m remembering wrong. However vb was incredibly cheap
ghaff 5y ago
A lot of productivity/business software was in the hundreds of dollars. It was pretty radical Turbo Pascal from Borland was priced at only about $50--which is still getting close to $100 in today's money, given that most compilers, etc. were $300+. As the article suggests, pretty much anything you bought in a store was going to be in the $50 range although there was cheaper shareware (which the majority didn't pay for) and freeware.
AlbertCory 5y ago
A further note: I worked on Reflex (by Analytica). That product bombed at $495, which was a price set in envy of Lotus. The company went under and got bought by Borland for pocket change. Phillippe cut the price to $100 (still a lot in today's dollars), sold it by mail order, and made it a best seller.

klelatti 5y ago

- Smaller market so fewer sales to spread fixed costs over - Some of this software was novel so little or no competition

laurent92 5y ago
- Bad methods. Waterfall. Lack of pivoting.
- trimbo 5y ago
  I'm interested to know how one should quickly pivot software written in 6502 assembly and physically distributed in retail stores.
  - simonh 5y ago
    You can’t, so they didn’t, so software was expensive.

bodhiandphysics 5y ago

Also note diskettes were very expensive!!

ghaff 5y ago
When I was in business school in the 1980s, I had a small side business selling students the floppy diskettes they needed for the PCs in the new computer lab. (Very few owned their own computers although I did.) I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think the campus store sold them for about $10 each. I bought off-brand in bulk and sold them for at least a 50% discount (with free replacement guarantee) while still making something like a 3x markup.

bodhiandphysics 5y ago

Also pro software is still very expensive. A seat of maya costs 2000 a year. Solid works cost 3500 for a license. Matlab costs 2 grand. Microsoft’s compiler products weren’t particularly expensive ( and were much much cheaper than say a small talk seat)

_delirium 5y ago
Adobe is up there too, $1k per seat per year for a business license of Creative Cloud.
auxym 5y ago
I worked at a place that was paying almost 20K CAD per seat per year for CATIA and some add-ons (PDM, FEA, etc). I hear ANSYS, if you get a few products, quickly runs up in that range also.
- bodhiandphysics 5y ago
  Catia and Ansys are crazy expensive.. though my boss is buying me an 8000 dollar gpu so... basically differential equations are expensive
igouy 5y ago
March 7, 1988 — "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95, the company said. Registered users of Digitalk's Smalltalk/V can upgrade for $75 until June 1." https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&ots=jiXJNN0ii3&dq=digitalk%20v%2F286&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q=digitalk%20v/286&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&ots=...

zeteo 5y ago

The production cost was high since they wrote it directly in assembly and/or C and used very few external libraries. It was code golfing everyday and you couldn't afford many bugs since rolling out patches was a huge pain. So you truly needed rockstar programmers to pull it off. (The closest equivalent today would be custom embedded firmware - not cheap.) In terms of value, I'm pretty sure 30 years from now they'll laugh at the quality of today's UI and what we pay for it. For the time they had quite adequate graphics considering they were competing with arcade games and playing cards. Also IIRC they ran pretty fast on less hardware than you get in a coffee machine today.

DanBC 5y ago

See also online access being very expensive. Compuserve, charging $11 per hour ($25 per hour in 2021 dollars), had "more than 250,000 subscribers". The Source, charging $8 per hour, was popular for its conferencing system "parti". Delphi, charging $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users) following. BIX, $9 per hour, grew from a magazine. Notable quote: "This is the computer industry as it used to be: people sharing ideas and solutions without the greed and grit with associated with today's corporate driven, litigation-laced, industry" From the Whole Earth Catalogue "Signal - Communication tools for the Information Age" (http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1300 http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1...)

ghaff 5y ago
And don't forget the telephone charges. Even if you weren't dialing a different area code, calling further than your local exchange or set of exchanges could be >$1/minute. (Indeed, intrastate calls could cost more than interstate calls.) So there were a bunch of apps for both commercial services and BBS systems to let you get on, download messages, and get offline as quickly as possible. You then could read/reply to messages offline and log back on just to upload them.
h2odragon 5y ago
PCPursuit! or better yet ungaurded university or business modem pools

h2odragon 5y ago

It was easier to price software that high when people had invested so heavily in the computer already. When the computer was $3,000; another $300 for a BASIC compiler was easier to swallow (especially given there were few alternatives and none free). I was involved in one company in the mid 80s that sold most of its units of a niche software package in combination with a full system, printer, etc. Most of our customers didn't have a computer or if they did wanted another as a dedicated tool to run our software... Which was essentially some spreadsheets and a friendly menu system. $1,900 for the software or $4k to $8k for various hardware packages with it, as i recall.

hutzlibu 5y ago
Maybe it was also because people were closer to understanding how things work? I often came across the mindset, that people already payed so much for their computer - so now they feel the software they need, should be included and are unwilling to spend more money because in their mind it goes together. (although I think, that assumption got less over the years)
conductr 5y ago
> When the computer was $3,000; another $300 for a BASIC compiler was easier to swallow It’s funny to me but I almost feel like computers were a pyramid scheme in the 80s “You should get a computer for home“ “Really? What can I do with it?” “Run compilers and some business software” “I don’t need business software at home, what’s a compiler?” “It helps you build software. It’s like learning a foreign language” “Oh, I see. So, I buy the computer, then buy software, to make more software which sounds very difficult” “Exactly!” “How much?” “Roughly a Ford Mustang” “Let’s do it”
- ghaff 5y ago
  You can find quite a few pieces from that era gently poking fun at home PCs and the available software and utility. This is a really funny one from the New Yorker: https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2005/04/29/man-bytes-dog-by-james-gorman/ https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2005/04/29/man-bytes-dog-by-jam... There's a book which I could probably find if I were at home that had a piece going into the limitations of spreadsheets, accounting software, etc. that was also hilarious.

macdice 5y ago

Some time in the early-ish 90s when I was a student I worked at a tiny place doing software development, targeting various commercial Unixes. Development was done on a lowly 486 running some variant of SCO System V UNIX, and I vaguely recall that the cost of licensing the system with compilers was thousands of dollars (you had to pay a lot of money for each little feature of the OS too, like TCP, SMP, ...). Or it would have been, if it hadn't been for some guys at the little ISP next door who gave us a copy of GCC, which was a gateway to running Slackware Linux, which was pretty soon where all future development was done before transferring it over to customers' HPUX boxes or whatever. I was just a kid catching the tail end of all that, but there are still a couple of hard-to-get-your-hands-on big iron Unixes like that; I've worked on most of them (ie those and many that are gone), and I must say it's surprising to me that, by now, you still can't just download an ISO and run it on qemu or whatever (actually you can, but it's probably illegal). I could forget about them entirely, if I didn't have to keep the open source stuff I work on working on them too, with limited access and no CI...

anthk 5y ago
Getting Slackware from cdrom.com was a bargain.

anthk 5y ago

"Adventure" for $30, that's a steal. If should've cost as much as $6 ase game was free as in freedoom.

andai 5y ago

Can anyone comment on how the price of programmers has changed over time?

ghaff 5y ago
Like many things, I'm sure the answer is "it depends" on the skill sets and location--and I'm sure the situation is even more confused when commercial computing was very new. But my impression from working in the computer systems space was that there was not a real salary distinction between the electrical engineers and the software people in the 80s through early to mid-90s. And California did not generally offer a sufficient premium to cover CoL at the time. [ADDED: At least this was my experience as a Boston-area person who was recruited by some West Coast companies. One reason I stayed put.] And, oh, you almost certainly needed a CS or at least an engineering degree.

harikb 5y ago

Some of the software in the list should be compared with "enterprise software sales". $335 for a ledger software isn't bad when you think it is bought by a company/business. Moreover, there was a certain amount of hand-holding, service & support implied with sales in those days. If you want to talk of rip-offs, in early 90s, I bought a casio organizer with my hard earned $35 only to realize the connectivity cable+software to a PC costs $150+ more

jdminhbg 5y ago

A common sentiment on HN (and other programming-centric communities) is nostalgia for early computing days, and specifically, how easy it was to become a programmer. You turned on your Commodore and it booted into a BASIC prompt, for example. No webpack/babel/toolchain nightmare between you and making a computer do things. But as someone who started programming as a kid in the late 80s/early 90s, I think this nostalgia vastly understates how many barriers existed between enjoying doing things in BASIC and moving forward to different levels or paradigms of programming. I was made vaguely aware of the existence of C by computing magazines, but the idea of actually buying a C compiler was totally out of the question. My high school had Pascal available, but nothing else. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 90s that the internet and open source evolved to the point where programming languages and tools became ubiquitous to the point where you stopped thinking about how you might acquire them.

harikb 5y ago
On the other hand, lack of internet allowed one to "borrow" (pirate) software from a friend who had it. No sign in required to ones Jetbrains account.
cube00 5y ago
I remember wanting to create Windows applications but couldn't because Visual Studio (or Visual Basic) was so expensive. The only "free" alternative was to code it in assembly[1] which wasn't exactly easy beyond "Hello World" [1] https://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm https://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm
- jdminhbg 5y ago
  Yes. Even once I was in college in the late 90s, to get my own copy of Visual Studio was hundreds of dollars — discounted in the university book store for students from full retail, but still prohibitive for a college student.
ghaff 5y ago
To put some numbers to it, I bought a computer in the early 80s. No hard disk but it was still probably about $4K or so by the time you threw in a dot matrix printer and any other hardware, e.g. modem. I was actually working at the time but, as an engineer, my salary was about $25K. A PC clone was a significant investment. By the late 90s, I was in tech (as a product manager) and was making about double that. But a hard disk drive was still in the thousands of dollars and a compiler/assembler/debugger was still in the many hundreds of dollars range. And probably spend another few hundred on books because that's mostly what you needed if you wanted to look things up. Some of this you could copy of course. (Though the software came with a shelf full of manuals you sort of needed.) But you were still easily looking at a $10K+ investment in today's dollars to get into "serious" programming on your own. ADDED: There were ways to cut the costs of software especially but still a lot of money.

mikewarot 5y ago

Turbo Pascal was priced at $50 when it was introduced, and it just kept getting better with each new version. This was back when PCs were thousands of dollars for the lower end models. The price has to cover the costs, profits for all stages of the retail chain, spread across the market size. Consider the cost of Facebook's software, their sunk developer costs must be on the order of a Billion dollars. It's likely the same for all of the FAANGs. It would be interesting to estimate a price for all the work that has gone into the Linux ecosystem.

ghaff 5y ago
Keep in mind that the Linux Foundation has an incentive to come up with a large number. Still, this is over 10 years old and suggests $1 billion for the Linux kernel and over $10 billion for all the software in a Linux distribution: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/linux-foundation-publishes-study-estimating-the-value-of-linux/ https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/linux-foundati... And of course Facebook et al. is building on top of a lot of that open source development.

Animats 5y ago

Yes. Working for an aerospace company, we bought commercial software at commercial prices in the early 1980s. An Ada compiler for VAXen was $40,000. Interleaf, which was like Microsoft Word, was originally $60,000, and came with four Sun workstations and a laser printer. Getting a copy without buying hardware took negotiation, and was still over $1000 per copy. We had a formal license for UNIX for VAXen. We got that free, because the aerospace company and AT&T had a cross licensing agreement. The free license was a formal document that arrived with the embossed corporate seals of both companies. I made a copy and put it on the side of the CPU, while Legal kept the original. With that in hand, we could then run 4.1 BSD.

earthscienceman 5y ago
When I read this it made me realize just how "competitive" FOSS was in this type of landscape. I'm young enough, FOSS was mostly a moral/philosophical paradigm... not a comparison between open software and software that was thousands to license.
- Animats 5y ago
  Yes. On PCs, things like C cross-compilers for microcontrollers were very expensive, because the market was tiny. A C compiler targeting the 68HC11, a small microcontroller, was expensive enough in 1987 that I used Forth instead. And that wasn't free. I bought Walter Bright's Zortec C++ compiler for Windows in the 1990s, and I think it was about US$400.

xqcgrek2 5y ago

Don't Copy That Floppy! (as the saying goes....but many kids did...) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-M7FJKfR7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-M7FJKfR7k

jiveturkey 5y ago
05:15 It takes from fifteen hundred to two thousand hours to create a piece of quality software 12:30 Captain Crunch

ThinkBeat 5y ago

(I am not a gamer). To play the game you need a computer ALIENWARE AURORA RYZEN™ EDITION R14 about $5K (with Win11) Alienware 38 Curved Gaming Monitor about $1.5K Keyboard, mouse, chair, speakers tc $2K. That is 8.5K for just the computer. Look up prices just now I guess you can pay about $150 for a fancy edition of Far Cry 6 (converted from Norwegian prices), and then you can spend spend spend on DLC or whatever it is called. At least back then you you got the entire game when you bought it. Yeah I know you can buy a much much cheaper computer and monitor and everything else. But if you were a nerd who owned a computer to play games back then, you might be a huge esports dude now who needs leet gear now.

borp9 5y ago

The article dwells on game graphics, which don't meet modern expectations. But what people were paying for was gameplay.

ghaff 5y ago
As I recall, Infocom text adventures were priced at about the same price as the graphical games of the period. (But I was a beta tester and got them for free :-))

zabzonk 5y ago

Well, some cheap compilers (this is about 1984): - I got C for free on the first Unix systems the polytechnic I was working for bought - a desktop, but still a multi-user system. We had it connected to VT100 compatible terminals via the poly's WAN that anyone could connect to. - Desmet C on the IBM PC. I can't remember the exact price, but much less than 100 GBP, otherwise I couldn't have wangled the expense. - A C compiler on the Atari 512. It can't have been expensive, as after buying the hardware, I couldn't have afforded it! - Small C. Completely free, as I remember it. - Borland Pascal, also cheap. Of course, I think things are much better today with the likes of GCC.

ghaff 5y ago
>Desmet C I don't remember the price but it was probably something like $50 in the early 80s. Certainly far cheaper than the Microsoft C compiler. As I recall it had quite a few quirks though. Turbo Pascal was quite the innovation when it came out. I had a copy but never really got into it though. I don't remember the sequence but I was probably was into assembly by then and likely got Turbo C when it came out a few years later. I was in grad school for a couple years in there and wasn't doing much programming at the time. Still, none of this was especially cheap compared to free as in beer/speech today.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  > none of this was especially cheap compared to free as in beer/speech today Of course, but I was really pleased to get my boss to shell out for quite a good (at the time) C compiler! A couple (or something like that, maybe three) of years later, when I was working at the BBC, I got another boss to buy the Zortech C++ compiler, which really launched my career as a C++ programmer, although I had tried to use the E edition of C++ earlier, but found the installation on our Unix box too difficult.

ineedasername 5y ago

For context though, an Apple III started at about $4k, $13k in today's dollars. The type of computer that could run at least some of this software could only be purchased by people who either really needed it, or had disposable income. Either way, if you can carve out $13k for the computer, an extra few hundred $ in software was a relatively small incremental cost.

m0zg 5y ago

Meanwhile 100% of the software in the developing world was "free" at the time, and moreover it was difficult to buy software even if you wanted to pay for it. People would think you're not all right in the head or something, since you could buy a CD with $20K worth of software for less than a buck. I bet 90% of commercial software is "free" there in the same way even now, modulo the CDs. The somewhat non-obvious side effect of this is it's much harder for FOSS to get traction, unfortunately, even when it's objectively a better choice.

France_is_bacon 5y ago

Dude....this is not how it was. It was much less expensive. There was so much cracked software in those days. Security was so much worse.

Jensson 5y ago

At the time you paid to be a part of the computer revolution, Moore's law was at its peak no sign of stopping as the effect of commercial microchips had just started to kick in and home computers got exponentially cheaper by the year. Products were expensive, but it didn't matter as whoever mastered this new technology would go on to rule in the future when costs came down and the economics of scale kicks in for software.

admin786 5y ago

Thankss

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

some previous dicussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20988512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20988512