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by walrus01 1730 days ago
Inflation calculator says that a workstation computer package of hardware (PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse) selling for $5500 USD in 1988 would be the equivalent of $12,718.67 today.

That sort of money (except for ridiculous non-linear GPU prices today) would build one hell of a threadripper workstation.
4 comments
h2odragon 1730 days ago
in 1988, I got the "opportunity" to buy the most expensive computer a local whitebox shop built; which was a 286-20 with 1MB of RAM and room for a 2nd MB on the motherboard. There were 386-16 machines (just) out, but this was the "Xenix workstation". With the fancy EGA monitor and card, and iirc 40MB of disk, that came out to be just about $5,000.
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dylan604 1729 days ago
>the equivalent of $12,718.67

so a moderately equipped modern MacPro.

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lsllc 1729 days ago
Did you include the $699 wheels in that?

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...

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fzzzy 1729 days ago
Where we're going, we don't need wheels.
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itomato 1729 days ago
...without a UNIX license.
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Cthulhu_ 1730 days ago
It'd be hard to use that sort of money for a consumer-purpose PC; maybe a higher end server, but then you likely end up with a blade form factor.
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da_chicken 1730 days ago
> It'd be hard to use that sort of money for a consumer-purpose PC; maybe a higher end server, but then you likely end up with a blade form factor.

No, not at all. This isn't a workstation. It's a Workstation. It's not even a struggle to beat $12k.

A Mac Pro starts at $6k. You can add a 28 core Xeon for +$7k. 1.5 TB of memory is +$25k. Twin Radeons with 64 GB of video ram is another +$10k. 8TB of storage is another +$2.5k. You've picked CPU, RAM, graphics, and storage and you're already over $50k. That's no software. No display. Just the tower, a power cable, a mouse, a keyboard, and MacOS.

If you go to Dell and check out their Data Science Workstations, it's not difficult to configure one for over a quarter of a million dollars. Triple graphics cards, 6 TB of memory, dual 28-core processors. In a tower computer.

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kryptiskt 1730 days ago
If you go and spec up a HP Z workstation or Dell's comparable offering you can blow through it in no time. Just starting with putting in a TB of RAM will cost a fair bit.
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