On Sat, 20 Mar 1999 12:05:30 -0500, Steve Robertson <steverob_at_hotoffice.com>
wrote:
>>The tenative price of $500 seems awfully high to me. After all, it's not
>>like there is a lot of R&D involved, the components aren't exactly
>>cutting-edge, and to some extent the markets are already established.
I don't recall Fischer's Web site quoting a price. I applied the price
of $500 to a currently-mythical 25th Anniversary Edition kit which was my
$0.02.
I don't know if $500 is the right number either, but I figure that in a
"new" IMSAI 8080 kit in low quantities, there'd be at least $75 in boards,
$100++ for the case, $50 for the power supply, $25 for a silkscreened front
panel and the rest, silicon, passives, switches, and the backplane
connectors. And that doesn't iinclude any re-engineering costs to account
for parts that have been discontinued or marked as "end-of-life."
Given what happens when the old IMSAIs hit ePay, I'd pay $500 for a new
kit that I could build myself. I don't know if I'd want a Pentium-class
IMSAI with a front panel for $1200. I guess it would depend on how
faithfully it reproduced/simulated the operation of the original. I also
don't know if another bus standard is necessary, too.
Personally, I'd prefer a kit, and I think that $500-600 is not
unreasonable. I'm sure that if you open this up to the hobbyest community,
you'd find enough takers to make a 500-unit quantity production run
feasable.
[ Rich Cini/WUGNET
[ ClubWin!/CW7
[ MCP Windows 95/Windows Networking
[ Collector of "classic" computers
[
http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp/
[
http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/pdp11/
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Received on Sun Mar 21 1999 - 08:43:07 GMT