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Price of a Macintosh Quadra in 1993
October 7, 2008
Way back in 1993, a couple of friends asked me to join them on the road in a tour we called the Digital Imaging Tour. We traveled to 19 states, delivering lectures and demonstrations about the relatively new concept of using Adobe Photoshop and Apple Macintosh computers to make images. Our tour was sponsored by Apple, Leaf Systems, Kodak’s Center for Creative Imaging, and SuperMac Technology.
In addition to computers and a (very primitive and heavy) digital projector, we took a huge seamless rear projection screen and six Kodak Carousel projectors and a slide changing computer device for our lectures. We used 35mm slides for most of our work because the digital projector was not very good, and because of the clever techniques available at the time for mixing slides and music to make a dazzling presentation. PowerPoint had not yet been invented. Think about this: we used to travel on commercial airliners with all of this equipment, including two 20-inch SuperMac CRTs on shipping pallets.
The slide show would not have been possible without the services of a company in San Diego to which I sent my images from Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to be “recorded” onto 35mm film. The company had one of the first PostScript film recorders, a device that translated my digital files into beautiful slides. I would then mount these in pin-register plastic slide frames, and add them to our programmed show.
My, oh my! How things have changed!
Over the weekend I found a strip of unmounted 35mm film from that era. It has some amazing images on it.
In one, I must have been ranting about service bureaus because I remember that PostScript output had become a commodity, and I complained that people would shop price (only) and not be concerned with quality of imaging, density of the film, consistency and quality control. The image above is particularly biting, but perhaps flavorful, historically speaking.
In another, really telling piece of digital anthropology, I presented the cost of a Macintosh Quadra 700 computer, ready for Photoshop, a SuperMac 20-inch monitor and a Kodak RFS2035 scanner. I can’t believe that this isn’t a typographical error, but the total for the system was $19,150.
I remember all of it clearly, except the Kodak RFS scanner price, and I can’t imagine that was so expensive. I also remember outfitting a Mac FX computer a couple of years later for connection to a Crosfield scanner. At the time we were being held hostage to a contrived price of about $100 per MB of RAM due to a fire in an epoxy plant in Asia (the fire never occurred). At those prices, it took a big bank loan to get an adequate computer, and I am amazed that any of us put up with it. But we needed the technology then, just as we need it today.
It’s a good thing that computer prices have fallen over the years. If I factor for 6% inflation over those 15 years, a similar system today would be over $51,000.
I’m feeling awfully good about my $3,000+ Macintosh Pro with four dual-core Intel processors right now. And, the little memory cards I buy at Costco for $40 hold 17 times more information than the hard drive in the 1993 Quadra 700. It’s pretty astonishing when you think about it, and today I'm thinking about it.
Posted by Brian Lawler on October 7, 2008 | Comments (4)
