Just trying to connect old mid-80's articles I hadn't thought of in decades, to reality... is this what's described in https://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/PDFs/pixar-image-processor.pdf They describe a $125K price in 1986 dollars for a complete system (e.g. not just the pedestal.) I did some work with ECL based backprojectors in the era immediately before and the VME based stuff with gate arrays and a Sun front end, and then a little later Tahoe front end, was coming in like gangbusters at the time for many of the industrial/medical applications.