[VA] SRC#005- April, 1st Mean Minichallenge

[Thomas Okken]

(04-12-2019 12:27 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  When it came out I was at univerisity and not even able to afford an HP-41. The 71B cost over twice as much and a couple of accessories could drive the price up to the level of a decent family car. My Ti-59 cost only half of the HP-41 for comparison. (The car I was driving at the time had cost me 300 DM, an HP-71B would have cost between 1500 and 2000 DM - just to show how out-of-the world the price tag was - about as much a Commodre PET, Apple II or other first-generation "home computer" which then were really the things we wanted to have).
I always wonder why so many of them are available on the collector market now, there must have been a lot of wealthy professionals back then who (or whose employer) could afford them. But that's good for us of course :-)

Oh, definitely professionals. Stuff that's astronomically expensive from a hobbyist's point of view can make perfect sense in a business context.

For example, one time when I had only been a professional programmer for a few years, I had to debug a memory leak. The application in question was large enough that simply staring at the code until I figured it out was not an option. I did a bit of research and found a tool that looked perfect for the job, but it was not something we already had. So, we would have to buy it, and the price was $1500 (U.S.).

With my hobbyist sensibilities, I thought $1500 was insane. But I really needed this thing, so I went to my boss, fully expecting to be turned down at such an extreme price tag. Instead, he didn't even blink. He just asked, "do you need this?" And I told him that I expected it to save me about two weeks of work on the current project. That was all he needed to hear, he signed the purchase order right away. And once I thought of what two weeks of my time actually cost the company, it was clear that this really was a no-brainer.

I'm sure that's how it goes with a lot of that seemingly-expensive HP equipment. It saves people work and that's how it pays for itself. And if it is just a bit more reliable or easy to use than cheaper equivalents, that extra money usually pays for itself, too.