Digging through some more files from my old backup tapes, I found some of the price lists I was giving out when I was building and selling computers. This also gives some idea of version numbers that were going around that time. I didn’t carry any inventory at all, these would have been bought at somewhere like Sam’s Club or some big retailer in Computer Shopper. I seem to recall doing about a $20-$60 markup on most software.
Procomm Plus 2.01 for DOS $85 Procomm Plus for Windows $120 QmodemPro for Windows $89.95 Corel DRAW! 5.0 for Windows $599 Adobe Photoshop 2.5 for Windows $525 Broderbund Printshop Deluxe 1.2 for Windows $69 Lotus Smart Suite 2.1 for Windows $475 (1-2-3, AmiPro, Approach, Freelance Graphics, Organizer) Microsoft Office Standard for Windows $470 (Word 3.0, Excel 5.0, PowerPoint 4.0, Mail) Microsoft Office Professional for Windows $557 (standard + Access) Artisoft LANtastic 6.0 1/5/1/25/100 user $115/$399/$725/$1389/$2230 Novell Netware 3.12 5/10/50/250 user $635/$1340/$1940/$2540/$3699 Novell NetWare 4.01 25/50 usr $2899/$3799 OS/2 2.1 for Windows $90 OS/2 2.1 $175 OS/2 2.1 Upgrade $130 MS-DOS 6.22 Upgrade $58 Microsoft Windows 3.11 $125 Borland C++ 4.0 $350 Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 $88 Turbo Pascal 7.0 for DOS $135 Microsoft MASM "ask" MS Visual Basic 3.0 Professional for Windows $328, for DOS $335 MS Visual C++ 3.5 for Windows Standard $99 MS Visual C++ for Windows NT $385
A small office/home office (SOHO) system configuration looked like this:
486DX2-66, VESA Local Bus 8 MB RAM 15" 1280x1024 SVGA monitor Diamond Speedstar Pro VLB 1 MB video card 1.44 MB 3.5" floppy drive 540 MB EIDE hard drive 2x speed EIDE CD-ROM drive Full-tower case EIDE VLB controller US Robotics Sportster modem MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11
for an easy $1989.95!
I was usually marking my PC builds up by $200 and still undercutting most retailers. However there was no way I could compete with software bundles found with most retail PCs, such as throwing in something like MS Office, Encarta, or other stuff, unless I blatantly bootlegged the software. Which, many small PC builders did. I discovered this to great effect when running the ISP and walking people through setting up dial-up networking and needing their Windows 95 floppies/CD. They didn’t get one with their computer which half the time left them in a boned state where DUN was half installed/half broken.
Personal PC
My personal computer which I ran my BBS on looked like this:
486DX-33 8 MB RAM Windows 95 Maxtor 7245A 245 MB IDE hard drive, DrivesSpace compression to get 350 MB Seagate ST351A/X 40 MB IDE hard drive, for Linux Sony CDU-55E ATAPI CD-ROM drive VLB EIDE controller VLB Diamond Stealth 64 2 MB video card Soundblaster 16 Multi-CD sound card Colorado Jumbo 250 MB tape backup
I had a second machine that was a 286, 10 MHz on a LAN with Personal NetWare.
For Linux experimenting on my PC, my notes say I was running Slackware with kernel v1.1.59, with UMSDOS filesystem so Linux files and DOS could be on the same FAT filesystem. Looks like I was using a boot floppy disk to boot into Linux, later I used LOADLIN.
Modems were a 1428VQE, the world’s most generic external 28.8k modem, and a Zoom V.32bis
