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“corporations trying to make absolutely insane profits off everything that you did, where you were billed per minute by the minute” At least in the case of The
by TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
“corporations trying to make absolutely insane profits off everything that you did, where you were billed per minute by the minute”
At least in the case of The Source, it looks like they were leasing time from another company’s minicomputers. We don’t know their expenses so can’t assume they were making insane profits. As I recall, some IBM systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent per month.
- classichasclass 5y agoNear as I can determine, The Source never turned a profit. CompuServe eventually did.
- shakna 5y agoHowever, with the point I was trying to make, IBM was recouping their costs on those rentals within a year or two. They had a "disappointing" $2bn profit in a single quarter of 1979 [0] (very roughly, about $7Bn in today's currency), on $16Bn of revenue. They weren't exactly thin margins. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/12/archives/ibm-net-falls-18.html https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/12/archives/ibm-net-falls-18...
- sokoloff 5y agoI read your $2B in 1979 is $7B today and thought “that can’t be right!” (Thinking that was much too high.) It turns out that it’s almost $8B in actuality, making me far more wrong than I thought.