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Aucbvax.1621 fa.apollo utzoo!duke!mhtsa!ucbvax!Hank.Walker@CMU-10A Thu Jun 11 07:56:03 1981 personal computer economics Most of the comments on the Xerox Star that have appearred in the paper say something like "very nice...for half the price". VERY few companies have computer capitalization that exceeds $10,000 per person. That's roughly what it is at DEC (internal transfer cost), and the average outside company would have to spend a lot more to reach the same level, which I consider just adequate (terminal at home, one at work, access to several group machines). The comments that I have heard from people in marketing are that they don't think that large numbers of the Star will be sold to peons, but rather to management types, who can use it as a status symbol.

So one requirement of a personal workstation that you are going to give to everybody, including the secretaries, is a price of less than $10,000 including overhead from network, printer, file servers, etc. Also including software.

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