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Comment by gnfargbl | Hacker News Reader

100,000 units sold, software royalty of $7.50 a unit -- I make that a little over $2M in today's money. Not bad for what seems to have been about two months work.

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When I first saw the $7.50 royalty, I was thinking he’d make a decent payday as long as they sell 10K-20K of the things. Very surprised they sold 100K seems like a lot for the mid-80s for a relatively niche Mac accessory.

Everyone with a Mac had an ImageWriter printer; the scanner attachment was, by far, the cheapest way to add scanning capability. Many people bought them to add the capability, not because they needed them already.

A little later, the LaserWriter printer became the first generally affordable laser printer. But it was affordable only if you were rich or had a business case for it. The sub-thousand dollar laser printer took quite a few more years.

And even though networking was envisioned from the start of the Mac, Apple basically had to rush to finish AppleTalk networking in time for the release of the LaserWriter since it was so expensive it was assumed the only way anyone could justify the purchase price was to share it with an office workgroup rather than connect to a single workstation. It took 2 more years for Apple to finally introduce file sharing over their own network.

That really is the dream, isn’t it. To find work that is interesting, impactful, that you are uniquely qualified to do, and to be compensated handsomely for it.

It was probably easier to come by in 1987. Nowadays if you have a unique idea in computing, there’s 40 years’ worth of computing professionals around to step in and take the job.

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