55
votes
What accounted for the cost of ENIAC?
R&D stuff isn't manufactured (at first).
It's usually partially constructed, ripped up, and redone, multiple times, with long testing and debug cycles in between, all the while with payroll ...
- 7,954
42
votes
Accepted
386SX, NES and how much did data lines really cost anyway?
The situation with the 386(DX) v. 386SX is similar to the situation with the 8086 v. 8088. The big issue isn’t the data lines (although they do have an impact on complexity and cost when routing a ...
- 113k
36
votes
Accepted
How much did the first hard drives for PCs cost?
I looked at trade periodicals from the time in question, because the intended customer for a hard drive in the early 1980's was almost certainly a business or school (look at the prices, particularly ...
- 1,891
33
votes
Accepted
Why plastic cases?
Cost, both in manufacturing and design. The basic metal cases are simply that -- basic. Even modern PC cases are pretty simplistic being a metal box, with a plastic facade.
For home computers of the ...
- 11.6k
28
votes
What accounted for the cost of ENIAC?
So what was the other $478,000 spent on?
Paying people to design and build it would have been a fairly big component. People often underestimate the cost of labour, particularly if it is their own ...
- 11k
25
votes
Accepted
What accounted for the cost of ENIAC?
One of the biggest factors is that when you have a machine that requires 5,000,000 successful solder joints to function properly, you need to make sure that all of your solder joints are really really ...
- 366
22
votes
Why plastic cases?
Injection molding has a costly tooling cost but very low per-unit costs. This makes it cheaper to build a large number of cases.
Metal cases have a lower tooling cost but higher per-unit cost. This ...
- 17.3k
22
votes
386SX, NES and how much did data lines really cost anyway?
So that indicates extra data lines were very expensive; the difference between a 386SX and 386DX computer came to hundreds of dollars.
Not really. Sure, they need to have some room and routing - and ...
- 199k
20
votes
How much did the first hard drives for PCs cost?
TL;DR:
How much did the first hard drives for the IBM PC or Apple || cost, and how big were they?
Ready to use setups started around 3,000+ USD for 5 MiB in 1981
Long (Hi-)Story
As usual defining '...
- 199k
17
votes
Accepted
How did the Sinclair compare on price with the C64 in the UK?
Sinclair certainly competed vigorously on price, and designed their machines to achieve as low a price as possible. The ability to sell a computer for less than £100 was one of Clive Sinclair's goals ...
- 7,894
15
votes
386SX, NES and how much did data lines really cost anyway?
It's not just how many data lines, but where you have to route them.
While the PPU on the NES does have its own independent RAM, it is connected only to the PPU. To update the tile RAM from the main ...
- 12.9k
14
votes
Accepted
What were the selling points of the Atari 800 over the 400?
There are a few improvements that made the 800 more valuable
Candy Coleen
(400) (800)
RAM (original design 1979) 4 KiB 8 KiB
RAM (...
- 199k
12
votes
Why plastic cases?
I was designing computer housings back in "the day".
Plastic cases were comparatively cheap in volume, but challenging to bring to market. The technology of choice was structural foam. It was ...
- 737
12
votes
80286 pricing and availability
PC Magazine 11/1984 was first reporting about the PC/AT 5170. They quote a price tag of 3800 USD for the low end configuration with 256 KiB and 5800 USD for the high end configuration with 512 KiB RAM ...
- 1,274
11
votes
Accepted
Cost of dynamic versus static RAM in the early days
I did find some prices in BYTE:
November 1975, page 91
2107 4Kx1 Dynamic: $19.95 (0.49 cents/byte)
2111 256x4 Static: -- not listed
1101 256x1 Static: $2.25 (0.89 cents/byte)
April ...
- 1,091
8
votes
Cost of dynamic versus static RAM in the early days
My firm designed microcomputer boards in the late 1970s to early 1980s, and we often had discussions about whether a particular design was going to use static or dynamic RAM.
When you say "static RAM,...
- 558
8
votes
What accounted for the cost of ENIAC?
Here's a video about manufacturing UNIVAC 1108 (circa 1965, so a bit later but still illuminating). Notice how much is done by hand, even things like winding coils.
According to the University of ...
- 201
7
votes
80286 pricing and availability
When was the 286 first available for purchase by end users
Well, this of course depends a lot on the values of 'Available for Purchase' and 'End User'. Is the question about the chip, boards with a ...
- 199k
7
votes
Accepted
What was the retail price of CP/M?
[...] operating systems including PC-DOS for $40 or CP/M for $240. Customers looked at what appeared to be essentially equivalent products, looked at the sixfold price difference, and we all know the ...
- 199k
7
votes
Accepted
How much did it cost to develop the Z80 CPU?
In this document there is a mentioning of half a million dollars spent for designing the Z80.
- 9,716
7
votes
Accepted
Did ancillary LEDs trade arcade game design for manufacturing cost?
It may be impossible to give a simple answer, as a design is influenced by many parameters. Complexity (and thus price) might being one
A notable difference between these three games are the number of ...
- 199k
6
votes
What was the Macintosh's BOM cost?
The incremental cost, or "BOM cost", of the original 128K Macintosh was approximately $750 at the time.
This answer is trivially determined from the 1982-83 Apple Computer Inc. public financial ...
- 59.5k
6
votes
Accepted
C116 vs C64 cost
Chiclet keyboard. (But the full travel keyboard had been considered cheap enough for the Vic-20.)
That was not only at a different price level, but also a different time. After the ZX80 (and ZX81) ...
- 199k
6
votes
What were the selling points of the Atari 800 over the 400?
The Atari 800 allowed a maximum of 48k of RAM, vs the 16k maximum in the Atari 400. After 1980, both models shipped with maximum RAM - so you were getting three times as much memory with the 800. (...
- 476
6
votes
How much did a serial terminal cost?
Not sure about 1980, but in the early 80's my first job was with a small software company that wrote an accounting package that ran on Unix and MS-DOS systems.
Our preferred terminal for the Unix ...
- 3,264
6
votes
How many hours of labor did it take to assemble a minicomputer?
Most PDP-series machines of this era were built using a large number of cards (with soldered components) connected by a wire-wrap backplane and a series of cables. I think the cables were mostly used ...
- 16.5k
6
votes
How much did the first hard drives for PCs cost?
Disclaimer: I don't recall the exact prices and dates, so it's only rough estimates.
For my Z80 CP/M system, around 1984 I bought a 20MB hard drive for 3000DM (~ US$ 1200 by that time). It had the 5....
- 2,330
6
votes
Bill-of-material cost of early hard drives
what was the layout of the prime cost of early 8 and 5.25 inch hard
drives? From Seagate and competing manufacturers? BOM Cost and retail
margins (including relationships with dealer networks), R&...
- 6,485
5
votes
Labor input for manufacture of early personal computers
I don't have exact figures, because as pointed out in the comments it will vary massively between different production lines, machines, and times, and manufacturers weren't eager to publish this kind ...
- 12.7k
5
votes
Cost of dynamic versus static RAM in the early days
The Vic20 was not the last consumer product to use static ram on the main system board.
In the mid 90's a Socket 3 (486 class) motherboard was created by Ocean Technology octek.com - defunct. The ...
- 875
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible