My thought is that licenses were similarly cheap for historical programming tools like Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic. My dad got me Turbo Pascal for my birthday

My thought is that licenses were similarly cheap for historical programming tools like Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic. My dad got me Turbo Pascal for my birthday, for $39, after reading about it in the Wall Street Journal. But it seems like the proprietary languages have all withered, regardless of price. Even $195 for Mathematica is an obvious concession to this trend. I don't ever remember it being that cheap. I could write an essay on the benefits of free tooling, but enough has already been written. I'll spare you the slop. ;-)