edit: Wow these were actually $100-250k! Back in 1993 that was an immense amount of money. I bet you could have bought a nice San Francisco row house in the mission or other hot area for $100k back then.
32mb Ram, 1GB hard drive, 19”monitor. Monitor and system weight 80lbs if I remember correctly.
Alias was an additional 16k.
It sounded like a jet engine.
I loved it.
That was 20 years ago, when these machines were "only" 10 years old. Amazing how quickly things developed during the 90s; the Sparcstation 5 started at $3,995 (over $7k in today's money, and the sales price was probably higher still here in Europe), and ten years later you could get it for free!
I ended up giving it all away to a friend; when I was young I had a lot of time and interest to play around with this sort of stuff. These days, not so much.
A lot of them (probably the vast majority) simply got dumped, alas. I personally decided to dump a Challenge (basically an Onyx without the Reality Engine graphics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx). As in: I could have it if I wanted it, I used it for years but it had to go when it was obsoleted. I could have put the rack in my basement, but I'm not young anymore and it wouldn't be that many years before it would be a headache to get it out. So I said: "Sorry. Dump it."
Smaller is more manageable of course - I have a number of O2, O2+, Indy computers and an Octane. And a Fuel.
At work we had a bunch of Origin servers as well. All dumped.
Back to the Onyx - when it came out in 1993 I had some access to one, I worked in the same computer room for weeks at the time on an off. Played with the various graphics demos, mostly. But I watched what the guys were doing with it. It was very impressive, a huge step up from anything else, and the sheer performance and memory bandwidth of the thing was one big reason I argued for getting an SGI Challenge for a later technical project. And I was right on that, as it turned out. Nothing else could do the job at the time (in this price segment, at least).
As for the CPU speed - Like the R4000, the R4400 internal pipeline ran at a higher rate (internal multiplier): https://www.cpushack.com/MIPSCPU.html
So a year later, after being rejected from art school, I used my bit of college savings to buy the SGI and Alias.
I used it for a few small video projects and animations, and then started contracting for SGI doing design work for their website. They even gave me an old Indigo to work on.
I kept both machines for about 10 years and then finally gave away them away to a collector.
That's $20K in today's money, so depends on how you define "nice". A nice late model used Honda Civic.
$20K then is $40K now, so that's a bit of an underestimate for home prices, I think. [As it happens, my home was built about then, and the value has stayed in line with inflation figures]
P.S. that Honda Civic had one airbag, crank windows, didn't necessarily have a passenger side mirror, a tachometer, or a wiper on the rear hatch. And A/C was a dealer installed option. Don't ask about side impact protection.
To be honest, the idea of even getting a down payment of 100K for a house like that in SF is insanity. Crazy how prices skyrocketed in 30 years (I'm guessing 2008 didn't help much).
If that's true, maybe we're approaching another phase of that, where people move away from cities because they can work remote. And things like Starlink might make some places tolerable to work from that wouldn't be before. On the other hand, even rural property is expensive in a lot of places now. Nowhere is immune to real estate speculation.
That's it, location is becoming less of a factor to determine housing prices. That said, besides internet you still need good access to things like plumbing and electricity, social aspects, and of course the climate has to be liveable; I can't imagine what it's like since I live in a very moderate climate country (western Europe), but stuff is a lot more extreme in the US, and the actual amount of liveable space is limited.
I drove through central British Columbia once on a road trip. There's probably enough reasonably flat land to fit the population of California with room to spare, but it'd be a pretty hard sell to get many people to move there now. Prince George has about 74,000 people but it's the only moderately large city/town for hundreds of miles in any direction.
Prisons work well for these cases: Susanville is fairly rural (1.5 hours away from Reno?), it is the kind of place where if you drive north you get the dreaded "No services for 130 miles" sign. But they have a prison so they have jobs and services that come with the money those jobs bring (although you are still stuck heading to Reno if you need a real hospital or speciality care).
Yeah, but you're ignoring all the losing bets. How have property prices in Detroit and West Virginia held up? Industry there was booming at the time, who was to know that it would change?
Meanwhile, California and Arizona were practically empty...
1. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2758-Claythorne-Rd-Beachw...
Doubling your money in 30 years isn't great at all. And this is within about 50 miles of tech jobs, although the drive will take 90 minutes in the morning and 60 minutes at night.
The solution is to make better use of valuable land by encouraging (or enforcing) high density
Holy shiz, is California real estate really that cheap?
400K is a very basic house in the outskirts of a city in Austria(Europe), and tech jobs here pay 1/4 of what you can make in California. I feel we're being scammed over here with housing and wages.
Also, quality of life in Tracy is pretty poor. Property crime is pretty big. Virtually nothing for children to do. Young adults go to the same 5-6 average restaurants and that's it. I'd much prefer to live in a town near a nice city in Austria.
Building even a simple new home will set you back at least 300k.
Who can build a house in a year by himself? Even with a group of skilled professionals it can take longer. Plus you'll be on zero income for a whole year.
>Maybe get into the home building business altogether.
Easier said than done. In Europe this is a credentialized profession so for insurance purposes not everyone can just roll up their sleeves anymore and just start building houses like it's 1886.
The sturdy way to build immensely drives up costs for material and labor.
But who knows? With WFH being more accepted I can see some less city oriented folk moving out to those areas and gentrifying it. It may be desert, but it still has everything you'd want out of a neighborhood outside of entertainment.
California is bigger than most European countries... As with them, some remote areas are much cheaper than others. The Central Valley is the most remote and depressed part of the state, used overwhelmingly for farming.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/14412-Larchmere-Blvd-Shak...
It'd be real swell if the residents of easy van stopped trying to block new ownable properties from being built so they can keep banking off their control over the housing and rental market.
That's not as true for smaller properties
Given the cost of those, did the companies actually own them, or was it more like a lease? And given the cost, would they work on them in shifts to get the most out of them? I can't imagine they would be treated the same as we treat laptops and other work items these days. For one, they'd probably be in a high security section. And I can imagine it'd only be used for the final work that actually needed that power, where most "grunt work" would be done on cheaper machines.
It seems weird to me you could've bought a house for the price of two cars. Either cars were too expensive, or houses were too cheap.
Just think you had to ask the most opinionated people in your town every time you want to get a new computer and potentially ask people in your neighborhood when you want to make minor changes to you existing computer...
But that too has limits; megacities like Singapore have built upwards for decades and is still one of the most expensive places to live.
And another factor is that landlords and investors will resist oversupply. This is where China went wrong, billions have been invested in brand new cities that are effectively ghost towns; preparing for an influx of people that never came.
if they hadn’t, i’d argue that’d blunt prices.