> That's over $100,000 today. Imagine living in a world where it cost you $100,000 to access a c compiler. That's one extreme. The point you are missing is th

> That's over $100,000 today. Imagine living in a world where it cost you $100,000 to access a c compiler. That's one extreme. The point you are missing is that, even without pressure from opensource, poor 90s highschool me was still able to afford Borland Turbo C and Watcom C/C++. I still have the manuals for TASM and the CD with Watcom C/C++ on it. At the time there was no opensource competition to those two products, and yet they were still affordable. There was very little opensource in the 90s, but much of the software I wanted was still available - shareware was a thing, and it drove sales.