zlacker

My thought is that licenses were similarly cheap for historical programming tools like Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic. My dad got me Turbo Pascal for my birthday, for $39, after reading about it in the Wall Street Journal.

But it seems like the proprietary languages have all withered, regardless of price. Even $195 for Mathematica is an obvious concession to this trend. I don't ever remember it being that cheap.

I could write an essay on the benefits of free tooling, but enough has already been written. I'll spare you the slop. ;-)