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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

Some things that jumped out at me while reading this article:

Stata offered to secure a $2 million three-year subordinated loan from the Bank of Boston in exchange for options to buy $2 million in stock and a position on the Board.52

In 1983 2 million was a shit ton of money. By comparison, in 2015, it would be around 5 million.

Infocom hired three product managers, who each had assistants and secretaries under them

A marketing manager with assistants and a secretary? Oh how things have changed. If you were this guy in 1983, you had effectively made it. Today, if you're a marketing manager, you'd be lucky if you weren't still stuck in a cube.

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>A marketing manager with assistants and a secretary? Oh how things have changed.

(Assuming that description is accurate) it really wasn't typical for the time. That said, compared to today, there were still a lot more secretaries and assistants floating around given the (mostly) lack of email/calendaring, web-based information of any kind, and general friction associated with just about everything. I sometimes half-joke that if I went back to my product manager job starting in 1986, I'd quit in a week out of complete frustration at the lack of tools and information to do my job.

  In 1983 2 million was a shit ton of money. 
  By comparison, in 2015, it would be around 5 million

I expected a difference of an order of magnitude or more...

1983 slips into the very tail-end of a high US inflationary period. Inflation has mostly been relatively low since. You can use any of the many online CPI calculators to calculate value of money. (Of course, it's only one measure of spending power change but, in this case, it's probably the most relevant one.)

Current data is only available till 2014. In 2014, the relative worth of $2,000,000.00 from 1983 is:

  $4,750,000.00  using the  Consumer Price Index  
  $4,060,000.00  using the  GDP deflator  
  $4,660,000.00  using the  unskilled wage  
  $5,240,000.00  using the  Production Worker Compensation  
  $7,000,000.00  using the  nominal GDP per capita  
  $9,540,000.00  using the  relative share of GDP

It ranges from $4 to 9.5 million. [1]

1. http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/result.php?year_sour...

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