| Paying for compilers was very normal. In the early 80's I paid for the Realia COBOL compiler for MSDOS and paid for a screen library, ScreenIO, that generated full-screen (80 chars x 25 lines) applications. I had already written a film scheduling app for a client on a minicomputer and they were getting charged for time on the mini. Buying the PC and paying me $5K + annual maintenance was going to be cheaper than paying for minicomputer access. I had to buy a dev PC: a PC-AT 286 with a toggle switch on the back that allowed it to run a 6MHz or 8MHz; a 60MB Priam hard drive - one of the fastest available; and I think it had 2MB of RAM, though of course you could only use 640K with the rest usable as a RAM disk or disk cache. I think it was around $2500. For reference, IBM's PC-AT system at the time (1984) was $4K-6K with a 20MB drive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer/AT The Realia compiler was something like $1200 and the screen library was around $450 I think. They're apparently still selling ScreenIO, though now for Windows: http://www.screenio.com/purchase.htm Computer Associates bought the Realia company, abandoned the product, and focused on porting mainframe COBOL applications to the PC. I didn't make much on the initial deal, but charged $500/year for maintenance and they ran the thing for over 15 years. My main goal was to get a fast PC: I had been reading Byte and PC Magazine for a few months and this was a way to get one without me plunking down a lot of cash. I think it's kinda cool that a small company like Realia (out of Chicago) could create something like this and have a functioning company for many years with paid employees. Yeah, open source is great in some areas, but in some ways it is not so great. A few geniuses could not have a sustainable compiler business these days, no matter how great the software. |