> 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."
You forgot one vital component: the switches. The 7101 and 7103 series
switches used in the IMSAI front panel are still available new from C&K,
at $5-$6 each. They start adding up fast! And cost of a full-length (22-
slot) backplane would come to around $150-$200 these days. (Though you
could easily argue that now that we have memory boards larger than 4kbytes
you don't need all those slots, all of my real IMSAI's have 22-slot
backplanes...!)
A year or so ago I looked at what it would cost to make my "TIMSAI" IMSAI
clone into a commercial product. Street price, I calculated, would be about
$2000, and most of that was in the metalworking. There was only about $30
in semiconductors in the whole unit (and that included 256K SRAM and an
IDE/floppy controller).
--
Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa_at_trailing-edge.com
Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/
7328 Bradley Blvd Voice: 301-767-5917
Bethesda, MD, USA 20817 Fax: 301-767-5927
Received on Wed Mar 24 1999 - 08:28:55 GMT