3 ms·

Cheap off the shelf is important. I worked at a mac/pc shop in the mid 90s. To kit out a mac dev was easily 25,000. I could do a similar pc dev for about 250

Cheap off the shelf is important. I worked at a mac/pc shop in the mid 90s. To kit out a mac dev was easily 25,000. I could do a similar pc dev for about 2500. If I remember correctly sun was in similar ballpark numbers as the mac. I could tell even then once linux/bsd got its act together it would eat the server space as MS was starting to charge eye eyepopping numbers per user for network access on their servers. Cheap is not that big of a deal when you are working on a multi million dollar proj and there are 1-2 devs and maybe 1-2 users. But scale that past 20-30 and the numbers add up fast.

acdha 4y ago
> I worked at a mac/pc shop in the mid 90s. To kit out a mac dev was easily 25,000. I could do a similar pc dev for about 2500. Those numbers are off by an order of magnitude unless you lived somewhere with really hefty tariffs. You were probably looking at $2-6K for a PC and $3-8k for Mac depending on what you needed — most of the times when people did price comparisons they forgot to spec out equivalent builds so you'd have, say, a Mac with a CD-ROM, ethernet, high-quality video and audio being compared to a PC with basic sound hardware, no network card, and a lower-res video card. Even a NeXT cube wasn't $25K unless you bought three of them. Sun, SGI, etc. were higher and that was in no small part because they had the enterprise sales model where you had to call a sales person and negotiate a corporate purchase.