Yep... I'd say doomed from that perspective. Still, I remember the Pro/350 fondly.
Nice machine. There's a pretty cool promotional/documentary type video of Digital and
the Pro series. Pretty funny in retrospect.
________________________________
From: Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wed, February 10, 2010 3:53:06 PM
Subject: Re: The value of assembler language programmers [was RE: Algol vs Fortran was
RE: VHDL vs Verilog]
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 3:00 PM, geoffrey oltmans
<oltmansg at bellsouth.net> wrote:
I wonder how successful the likes of the Dec PRO
series would have been had they not been astronomically expensive, even compared to the
already expensive IBM PC/XT. I had a Pro/350 that my uncle bought brand new, and at the
time I think he spent close to $10k on it around 1983ish and it still had a monochrome
display.
For comparison, a "standard package" color IBM PC/AT (5170) w/dot
matrix printer and hard disk (larger than the Pro, admittedly) was $5K
at launch in 1985, IIRC.
-ethan