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Their price reflected their capabilities. I think they were something like $20k on the low end. A nice new car in 1993 was maybe $10k. Lots of homes even in

Their price reflected their capabilities. I think they were something like $20k on the low end. A nice new car in 1993 was maybe $10k. Lots of homes even in good cities sold for $20k. edit: Wow these were actually $100-250k! Back in 1993 that was an immense amount of money. I bet you could have bought a nice San Francisco row house in the mission or other hot area for $100k back then.

brailsafe 5y ago
must be nice to have made a 30x return on your house in 30 years
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  The real winners are the boomer generation. When they graduated college in the mid 60's wages were enormous relative to the cost of property. Property in all the now hotly competitive areas was dirt cheap too. If you bought in SF back then you've probably made 100x or more on the property value.
  - elihu 5y ago
    There's an interesting theory I came across that a lot of the cheap housing of that era was due to the interstate highway system, built partly during WWII. A lot of land that before was too far from cities for people to commute suddenly became in reach of people with decent cars. So that meant there was a whole lot of usable real-estate that hadn't already been built on, and that meant cheap land for about a generation. If that's true, maybe we're approaching another phase of that, where people move away from cities because they can work remote. And things like Starlink might make some places tolerable to work from that wouldn't be before. On the other hand, even rural property is expensive in a lot of places now. Nowhere is immune to real estate speculation.
    - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
      > On the other hand, even rural property is expensive in a lot of places now. Nowhere is immune to real estate speculation. That's it, location is becoming less of a factor to determine housing prices. That said, besides internet you still need good access to things like plumbing and electricity, social aspects, and of course the climate has to be liveable; I can't imagine what it's like since I live in a very moderate climate country (western Europe), but stuff is a lot more extreme in the US, and the actual amount of liveable space is limited.
      - elihu 5y ago
        Access to services is probably the main thing: schools, hospitals, grocery stores. Plumbing and electricity is a pretty low bar since wells and septic fields are a thing, and even electricity can be generated on site these days if it's not available. But most people wouldn't want to live three hours from the nearest grocery store. That rules out some areas that would otherwise be pretty reasonable. I drove through central British Columbia once on a road trip. There's probably enough reasonably flat land to fit the population of California with room to spare, but it'd be a pretty hard sell to get many people to move there now. Prince George has about 74,000 people but it's the only moderately large city/town for hundreds of miles in any direction.
        iancmceachern 5y ago
        Lots of California is this way also. People focus on the SF and LA areas but there is so much empty land in thr rest of the state. Much of the hurdle to living there, as previously noted, is access to services. Mainly medical and grocery for me. Having to drove 2-3+ hours to get to a decent medical facility isn't in the cards for us.
        seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        The biggest hurdle to living in those places is actually access to jobs. I guess it works if you can WFH, but if you don't have that option, you want a vibrant job market. With jobs comes wealth and then services like retail and medical care. Prisons work well for these cases: Susanville is fairly rural (1.5 hours away from Reno?), it is the kind of place where if you drive north you get the dreaded "No services for 130 miles" sign. But they have a prison so they have jobs and services that come with the money those jobs bring (although you are still stuck heading to Reno if you need a real hospital or speciality care).
  - axiolite 5y ago
    > Property in all the now hotly competitive areas was dirt cheap too. Yeah, but you're ignoring all the losing bets. How have property prices in Detroit and West Virginia held up? Industry there was booming at the time, who was to know that it would change? Meanwhile, California and Arizona were practically empty...
    - asdff 5y ago
      Not sure why you are downvoted. Prices in certain places like the rust belt have been frozen in time for the most part, and even recent surges have only sent them up so much. I just decided to take a peek at a wealthy neighborhood in Cleveland for an example of a not so hot market. Here a 5 bedroom mansion on an acre lot goes for $520k. 22 years ago that home sold for $450k (1). I bet when you factor inflation that gain of $70k over 22 years was actually a loss. This is just one example but it goes to show that even recent surges have only done so much to spike prices from what was honestly decades of stagnation in real estate across much of the country. 1. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2758-Claythorne-Rd-Beachwood-OH-44122/33686428_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2758-Claythorne-Rd-Beachw...
- namecheapTA 5y ago
  In the central valley of California, a house cost $130k in 1993 and today sells for $400k. In those 30 years you probably painted it a few times, changed the roof just recently, changed the kitchen, and so forth. Plus 30 years of property tax. So you're probably in for $200k on that $130k house. And that's not even counting interest on mortgages that most buyers had in 1993. Doubling your money in 30 years isn't great at all. And this is within about 50 miles of tech jobs, although the drive will take 90 minutes in the morning and 60 minutes at night.
  - peregren 5y ago
    You also get to live in the house which is a pretty good return.
  - vikingerik 5y ago
    Houses do have utility. Doubling your money in an asset that provided living space for 30 years instead of paying rent is pretty great.
    - namecheapTA 5y ago
      Ok yes but even if this was a rental home and the renters basically paid the mortgage.. so you didn't get any utility out of it. 30 years later you made $200k, even if you put basically nothing down. As a return it's a lot percentage wise. Overall though, it's not life changing for most people. It only gets crazy money in the most desirable of areas. And that desire circle is basically described as driving range from the highest paying jobs.
    - Mikeb85 5y ago
      But they don't have so much utility that they should offer such returns on top of depreciation. The market is broken.
      - iso1210 5y ago
        It's not the house that appreciates much in value, its the land the house sits on.
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  how about 50x return? Home that cost $100,000 CAD is now well past $5,000,000 where I live. If someone hodl'd their property in Vancouver even longer than that they would be seeing 100x return.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    Hey, I live there too, I feel ya. Though you have to go pretty far back for that difference. I don't know that you'd have found what is currently a $5m property in Van that was $100k sometime in the last 30 years. It'd be real swell if the residents of easy van stopped trying to block new ownable properties from being built so they can keep banking off their control over the housing and rental market.
- postingposts 5y ago
  Must be nice to be able to afford a house.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    Indeed. Sucks to be one of those devs that just hasn't seen the same luck as a lot of ppl on here :(
    - postingposts 5y ago
      It’s not luck ask them who their families are. Laughs in too much knowledge
      - brailsafe 5y ago
        Unfortunately, that's kind of often the case. If you have access to millions in capital for a home early enough in life where banks will give you the mortage, you're probably coming from intense wealth already, you inherited it, or you were dealt a lucky hand early on by making a lot of cash and not losing the job for the first decade of your adult life. That's not as true for smaller properties
eternityforest 5y ago
If only housing had the same kind of price drop
- imtringued 5y ago
  Houses got bigger faster than they got cheaper. That's on top of land going up in value.
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    Yeah that's the problem, you can't just make more land, so there's no incentive to do anything other than make any area you own into an expensive area.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  If regulations for building houses were compostable to those for building computers... Just think you had to ask the most opinionated people in your town every time you want to get a new computer and potentially ask people in your neighborhood when you want to make minor changes to you existing computer...
  - Gollapalli 5y ago
    Microsoft is the new HOA, and Google the new building commission.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Given that land and the like is a limiting factor, the only way to get it cheaper is to develop the middle of the US (assuming it's about the US anyway), and / or to go upwards. But that too has limits; megacities like Singapore have built upwards for decades and is still one of the most expensive places to live. And another factor is that landlords and investors will resist oversupply. This is where China went wrong, billions have been invested in brand new cities that are effectively ghost towns; preparing for an influx of people that never came.
  - 5y ago
jweir 5y ago
In 1993 I bought a used SGI Personal Iris for 10k. 32mb Ram, 1GB hard drive, 19”monitor. Monitor and system weight 80lbs if I remember correctly. Alias was an additional 16k. It sounded like a jet engine. I loved it.
- holoduke 5y ago
  I wonder where all those machines ended up. Would love to get one and play with them.
  - smm11 5y ago
    I gave one away several years back to a high school art department. The other one is in my garage under two inches of dust.
    - tomatowurst 5y ago
      well you should consider auctioning that, it will fetch lot of eager attention
      - notreallyserio 5y ago
        Including the dust, if it is from the same era!
        tomatowurst 5y ago
        put that in a non-descript zip bag and include it in the shipping box!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mysterydip 5y ago
    http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/index.html http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/index.html Contact him if you're interested, nice to talk to!
johnnyanmac 5y ago
>I bet you could have bought a nice San Francisco row house in the mission or other hot area for $100k back then. To be honest, the idea of even getting a down payment of 100K for a house like that in SF is insanity. Crazy how prices skyrocketed in 30 years (I'm guessing 2008 didn't help much).
Razengan 5y ago
I loved QBasic
stergios 5y ago
I think the house prices were higher. I sold a house in Mountain View (Monta Loma neighborhood) in Jan 1995 for $255k. And that was a bit of a distressed sale as I was the executor for an estate.
- astura 5y ago
  Of course they were, the idea everyone used to be able to buy a house on a minimum wage salary is an internet fantasy. My parents bought a fixer upper in a crappy neighborhood for $90,000 in 1996.
- asdff 5y ago
  What is crazy about those prices is even though they are high, they weren't higher than any other wealthy area of a metropolitan region at that time. Neighborhoods in the greater Cleveland area were getting those prices back then too (e.g. shaker heights, cleveland heights, hudson, plenty more). The only thing is, those same neighborhoods in Cleveland only went up maybe another $200k or so since, and median prices in SF went up by what $1 million or more? Things really flew off the rails for the housing market in certain places just in the last few decades too.
DeathArrow 5y ago
Inflation for USD is almost 100% since 1993. It seems weird to me you could've bought a house for the price of two cars. Either cars were too expensive, or houses were too cheap.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
On the one hand I want to stop complaining about the price of high-end workstations like Apple's stuff, on the other, my employer wouldn't spend $6000 on hardware, let alone >$100K, I'm not that special. Given the cost of those, did the companies actually own them, or was it more like a lease? And given the cost, would they work on them in shifts to get the most out of them? I can't imagine they would be treated the same as we treat laptops and other work items these days. For one, they'd probably be in a high security section. And I can imagine it'd only be used for the final work that actually needed that power, where most "grunt work" would be done on cheaper machines.
vba616 5y ago
>A nice new car in 1993 was maybe $10k That's $20K in today's money, so depends on how you define "nice". A nice late model used Honda Civic. $20K then is $40K now, so that's a bit of an underestimate for home prices, I think. [As it happens, my home was built about then, and the value has stayed in line with inflation figures] P.S. that Honda Civic had one airbag, crank windows, didn't necessarily have a passenger side mirror, a tachometer, or a wiper on the rear hatch. And A/C was a dealer installed option. Don't ask about side impact protection.

brailsafe 5y ago

must be nice to have made a 30x return on your house in 30 years

qbasic_forever 5y ago
The real winners are the boomer generation. When they graduated college in the mid 60's wages were enormous relative to the cost of property. Property in all the now hotly competitive areas was dirt cheap too. If you bought in SF back then you've probably made 100x or more on the property value.
- elihu 5y ago
  There's an interesting theory I came across that a lot of the cheap housing of that era was due to the interstate highway system, built partly during WWII. A lot of land that before was too far from cities for people to commute suddenly became in reach of people with decent cars. So that meant there was a whole lot of usable real-estate that hadn't already been built on, and that meant cheap land for about a generation. If that's true, maybe we're approaching another phase of that, where people move away from cities because they can work remote. And things like Starlink might make some places tolerable to work from that wouldn't be before. On the other hand, even rural property is expensive in a lot of places now. Nowhere is immune to real estate speculation.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    > On the other hand, even rural property is expensive in a lot of places now. Nowhere is immune to real estate speculation. That's it, location is becoming less of a factor to determine housing prices. That said, besides internet you still need good access to things like plumbing and electricity, social aspects, and of course the climate has to be liveable; I can't imagine what it's like since I live in a very moderate climate country (western Europe), but stuff is a lot more extreme in the US, and the actual amount of liveable space is limited.
    - elihu 5y ago
      Access to services is probably the main thing: schools, hospitals, grocery stores. Plumbing and electricity is a pretty low bar since wells and septic fields are a thing, and even electricity can be generated on site these days if it's not available. But most people wouldn't want to live three hours from the nearest grocery store. That rules out some areas that would otherwise be pretty reasonable. I drove through central British Columbia once on a road trip. There's probably enough reasonably flat land to fit the population of California with room to spare, but it'd be a pretty hard sell to get many people to move there now. Prince George has about 74,000 people but it's the only moderately large city/town for hundreds of miles in any direction.
      - iancmceachern 5y ago
        Lots of California is this way also. People focus on the SF and LA areas but there is so much empty land in thr rest of the state. Much of the hurdle to living there, as previously noted, is access to services. Mainly medical and grocery for me. Having to drove 2-3+ hours to get to a decent medical facility isn't in the cards for us.
        seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        The biggest hurdle to living in those places is actually access to jobs. I guess it works if you can WFH, but if you don't have that option, you want a vibrant job market. With jobs comes wealth and then services like retail and medical care. Prisons work well for these cases: Susanville is fairly rural (1.5 hours away from Reno?), it is the kind of place where if you drive north you get the dreaded "No services for 130 miles" sign. But they have a prison so they have jobs and services that come with the money those jobs bring (although you are still stuck heading to Reno if you need a real hospital or speciality care).
- axiolite 5y ago
  > Property in all the now hotly competitive areas was dirt cheap too. Yeah, but you're ignoring all the losing bets. How have property prices in Detroit and West Virginia held up? Industry there was booming at the time, who was to know that it would change? Meanwhile, California and Arizona were practically empty...
  - asdff 5y ago
    Not sure why you are downvoted. Prices in certain places like the rust belt have been frozen in time for the most part, and even recent surges have only sent them up so much. I just decided to take a peek at a wealthy neighborhood in Cleveland for an example of a not so hot market. Here a 5 bedroom mansion on an acre lot goes for $520k. 22 years ago that home sold for $450k (1). I bet when you factor inflation that gain of $70k over 22 years was actually a loss. This is just one example but it goes to show that even recent surges have only done so much to spike prices from what was honestly decades of stagnation in real estate across much of the country. 1. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2758-Claythorne-Rd-Beachwood-OH-44122/33686428_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2758-Claythorne-Rd-Beachw...
namecheapTA 5y ago
In the central valley of California, a house cost $130k in 1993 and today sells for $400k. In those 30 years you probably painted it a few times, changed the roof just recently, changed the kitchen, and so forth. Plus 30 years of property tax. So you're probably in for $200k on that $130k house. And that's not even counting interest on mortgages that most buyers had in 1993. Doubling your money in 30 years isn't great at all. And this is within about 50 miles of tech jobs, although the drive will take 90 minutes in the morning and 60 minutes at night.
- peregren 5y ago
  You also get to live in the house which is a pretty good return.
- vikingerik 5y ago
  Houses do have utility. Doubling your money in an asset that provided living space for 30 years instead of paying rent is pretty great.
  - namecheapTA 5y ago
    Ok yes but even if this was a rental home and the renters basically paid the mortgage.. so you didn't get any utility out of it. 30 years later you made $200k, even if you put basically nothing down. As a return it's a lot percentage wise. Overall though, it's not life changing for most people. It only gets crazy money in the most desirable of areas. And that desire circle is basically described as driving range from the highest paying jobs.
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    But they don't have so much utility that they should offer such returns on top of depreciation. The market is broken.
    - iso1210 5y ago
      It's not the house that appreciates much in value, its the land the house sits on.
tomatowurst 5y ago
how about 50x return? Home that cost $100,000 CAD is now well past $5,000,000 where I live. If someone hodl'd their property in Vancouver even longer than that they would be seeing 100x return.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  Hey, I live there too, I feel ya. Though you have to go pretty far back for that difference. I don't know that you'd have found what is currently a $5m property in Van that was $100k sometime in the last 30 years. It'd be real swell if the residents of easy van stopped trying to block new ownable properties from being built so they can keep banking off their control over the housing and rental market.
postingposts 5y ago
Must be nice to be able to afford a house.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  Indeed. Sucks to be one of those devs that just hasn't seen the same luck as a lot of ppl on here :(
  - postingposts 5y ago
    It’s not luck ask them who their families are. Laughs in too much knowledge
    - brailsafe 5y ago
      Unfortunately, that's kind of often the case. If you have access to millions in capital for a home early enough in life where banks will give you the mortage, you're probably coming from intense wealth already, you inherited it, or you were dealt a lucky hand early on by making a lot of cash and not losing the job for the first decade of your adult life. That's not as true for smaller properties

eternityforest 5y ago

If only housing had the same kind of price drop

imtringued 5y ago
Houses got bigger faster than they got cheaper. That's on top of land going up in value.
- eternityforest 5y ago
  Yeah that's the problem, you can't just make more land, so there's no incentive to do anything other than make any area you own into an expensive area.
ajmurmann 5y ago
If regulations for building houses were compostable to those for building computers... Just think you had to ask the most opinionated people in your town every time you want to get a new computer and potentially ask people in your neighborhood when you want to make minor changes to you existing computer...
- Gollapalli 5y ago
  Microsoft is the new HOA, and Google the new building commission.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Given that land and the like is a limiting factor, the only way to get it cheaper is to develop the middle of the US (assuming it's about the US anyway), and / or to go upwards. But that too has limits; megacities like Singapore have built upwards for decades and is still one of the most expensive places to live. And another factor is that landlords and investors will resist oversupply. This is where China went wrong, billions have been invested in brand new cities that are effectively ghost towns; preparing for an influx of people that never came.
- 5y ago

jweir 5y ago

In 1993 I bought a used SGI Personal Iris for 10k. 32mb Ram, 1GB hard drive, 19”monitor. Monitor and system weight 80lbs if I remember correctly. Alias was an additional 16k. It sounded like a jet engine. I loved it.

holoduke 5y ago
I wonder where all those machines ended up. Would love to get one and play with them.
- smm11 5y ago
  I gave one away several years back to a high school art department. The other one is in my garage under two inches of dust.
  - tomatowurst 5y ago
    well you should consider auctioning that, it will fetch lot of eager attention
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      Including the dust, if it is from the same era!
      - tomatowurst 5y ago
        put that in a non-descript zip bag and include it in the shipping box!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mysterydip 5y ago
  http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/index.html http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/index.html Contact him if you're interested, nice to talk to!

johnnyanmac 5y ago

>I bet you could have bought a nice San Francisco row house in the mission or other hot area for $100k back then. To be honest, the idea of even getting a down payment of 100K for a house like that in SF is insanity. Crazy how prices skyrocketed in 30 years (I'm guessing 2008 didn't help much).

Razengan 5y ago

I loved QBasic

stergios 5y ago

I think the house prices were higher. I sold a house in Mountain View (Monta Loma neighborhood) in Jan 1995 for $255k. And that was a bit of a distressed sale as I was the executor for an estate.

astura 5y ago
Of course they were, the idea everyone used to be able to buy a house on a minimum wage salary is an internet fantasy. My parents bought a fixer upper in a crappy neighborhood for $90,000 in 1996.
asdff 5y ago
What is crazy about those prices is even though they are high, they weren't higher than any other wealthy area of a metropolitan region at that time. Neighborhoods in the greater Cleveland area were getting those prices back then too (e.g. shaker heights, cleveland heights, hudson, plenty more). The only thing is, those same neighborhoods in Cleveland only went up maybe another $200k or so since, and median prices in SF went up by what $1 million or more? Things really flew off the rails for the housing market in certain places just in the last few decades too.

DeathArrow 5y ago

Inflation for USD is almost 100% since 1993. It seems weird to me you could've bought a house for the price of two cars. Either cars were too expensive, or houses were too cheap.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

On the one hand I want to stop complaining about the price of high-end workstations like Apple's stuff, on the other, my employer wouldn't spend $6000 on hardware, let alone >$100K, I'm not that special. Given the cost of those, did the companies actually own them, or was it more like a lease? And given the cost, would they work on them in shifts to get the most out of them? I can't imagine they would be treated the same as we treat laptops and other work items these days. For one, they'd probably be in a high security section. And I can imagine it'd only be used for the final work that actually needed that power, where most "grunt work" would be done on cheaper machines.

vba616 5y ago

>A nice new car in 1993 was maybe $10k That's $20K in today's money, so depends on how you define "nice". A nice late model used Honda Civic. $20K then is $40K now, so that's a bit of an underestimate for home prices, I think. [As it happens, my home was built about then, and the value has stayed in line with inflation figures] P.S. that Honda Civic had one airbag, crank windows, didn't necessarily have a passenger side mirror, a tachometer, or a wiper on the rear hatch. And A/C was a dealer installed option. Don't ask about side impact protection.