I won an AT&T Safari NSX/20 laptop [1] in 1992 in the ACM Programming Competition. RRP was $5749 then, for a 386SX processor running at 20MHz, 4MB RAM and a monochrome screen. $10,200 in today's money. It was actually a beautifully made machine.
A year later, I switched to a Dell with 386DX and a 387 math coprocessor because my PhD needed the number crunching. That cost twice as much (i.e. around $20k in today's money), paid by the military lab sponsoring my research.
In our current times of cheap compute, it is easy to forget how much top-end computers cost 25-30 years ago.
I won an AT&T Safari NSX/20 laptop [1] in 1992 in the ACM Programming Competition. RRP was $5749 then, for a 386SX processor running at 20MHz, 4MB RAM and a monochrome screen. $10,200 in today's money. It was actually a beautifully made machine.
A year later, I switched to a Dell with 386DX and a 387 math coprocessor because my PhD needed the number crunching. That cost twice as much (i.e. around $20k in today's money), paid by the military lab sponsoring my research.
In our current times of cheap compute, it is easy to forget how much top-end computers cost 25-30 years ago.
[1] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AoKUhNoOys4C&lpg=PP142&o...