VivienM wrote on 2024-05-02, 23:00:But that's the same thing as US$10,000 Macs in the late Gassee era. Fundamentally, for business, people, not computers, cost mon […]
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Jo22 wrote on 2024-05-02, 15:18:Reminds me of my dad. He knew a few architects back then. They had demand for powerful 386/486 PCs.
He installed 16 MB of RAM in […]
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Reminds me of my dad. He knew a few architects back then. They had demand for powerful 386/486 PCs.
He installed 16 MB of RAM in all of their PCs, to ensure workflow was never being hindered.
Because, that was the full memory expansion, pretty much.
Such customers didn't care if something did cost 1000 or 2000 more, according to him. These were peanuts to them. A perfectly working PC was much more important.
But that's the main difference between workplace PCs and home computers, I suppose.
But that's the same thing as US$10,000 Macs in the late Gassee era. Fundamentally, for business, people, not computers, cost money.
Some tasks, e.g. running Photoshop filters, took hours of machine time on late 80s/early 90s machines. If you're paying a graphic designer to sit idle in front of a machine for 4 hours while the machine crunches a task, a $10K computer that lowers that time to 2 hours or a funky $7K accelerator board that gets it down to 1.5 hours gives you great return on your money. Effectively, for a $7-10K outlay that's good for, say, two years, you've potentially doubled a person (whom you are paying a lot more than $5K/year)'s productivity.
On the Mac side of things, at least, things were just wild in the early 1990s with funky accelerators, etc at steep price tags. (Craziest example is probably the Radius Rocket series...) And I presume they sold well enough to keep these vendors in business until the mid-90s.
Eventually, though, you hit diminishing returns. If you're shrinking tasks from 4 hours to 2 hours, a $10K computer every 2 years is a great investment. If you're going from 30 seconds to 15 seconds... well, the business case is much, much less strong.
And that's why a lot fewer specialized performance-enhancing hardware exists today compared to 35 years ago. Some, of course, continues to exist for the tasks that today take hours or days or longer.
For a home machine, well, budget is a lot more important. If you don't have $4000 to spend on a computer, you don't have $4000, regardless of how much better the $4000 computer is compared to the $2000 one.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure if I can follow. It could very well be that way, though, not sure.
My father and me didn't learn to think this way, I assume.
He simply had gotten business orders. The architects wanted to have functioning PCs, have functioning tools.
And my father had made an proposal that would ensure that this was going to work. Then they've accepted (or he had to come up with another one).
There was no "if..then" thinking involved, as far as I know.
No thinking about profits or how things relate to each other, financially.
It was pretty straightforward approach, rather.
It simply was about getting the PC(s) to work and make sure they wouldn't make trouble any time soon.
Because, at the time, they mainly wanted to get rid of their old mechanical tools and paper plans and whatnot and instead start to work comfortably on a PC workplace.
This made editing drawings and sharing plans (via network, modem etc) much much easier than before.
The rest, such as financial planning, was up to the architect or the architect's bureau, not my father.
That being said, this was here in Europe in the early 90s. People didn't talk so much about money openly.
Mentality was different, too, maybe. People were more down to earth, I guess.
And I was very young at this time. The workplace of architects was no "playground" so I couldn't accompany my father, even if I wanted to.
Edit: It also was a matter of trust, at some point, I suppose.
In such fields, you can't let a random person/company have access to the offices.
I mean, you technically can, but.. There are confidential plans about construction projects and such.
So it's no like in the states, were the cheapest company "wins" a contract through sheer competition or something.
Such things were very individual, rather, to my understanding. At least were my father was working back then.
Speaking of, my father was lucky that he was already being known by some business partners at the time,
which had recommended him further to certain architects.
To be fair, he did spend a lot of work there. Sometimes had to be available during night times, to fix things.
He remembers that especially one local printing company often had trouble with the older computers at the time (not originally installed by my dad, btw).
The issue had to do with foils, he said, I vaguely remember. These foils were like masters for the printer machines.
I think he already had a car phone by this time. And an early GSM cell phone.
Either a Motorola MicroTAC or an Hagenuk phone (MT-2000, the old model with the triangle antenna and Tetris).
Or did he get this one later? Hm. He also had an MT-900, which is still in the house.
Edit: Typos fixed.
Edit: Edited, formatting fixed.
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