Microsoft's 1987 employee price list: Windows for $10, Flight Simulator for $10, Excel for Mac for $20

“I present for your amusement the Microsoft employee price list from 1987,” writes Raymond Chen, a Microsoft engineer, on his Old New Thing blog. People who built Windows could buy it for the price of a lunch. That is the headline, and it comes with Chen’s own fine print: “(Note that these are the discounted employee prices, not the retail price.)”

The list is dated May 4, 1987. Windows on IBM, marked as the retail version, is $10.00, and the 3.5-inch Windows disk is also $10.00. Flight Simulator is $10.00 for both Macintosh and IBM. Excel for the Macintosh is $20.00, and so is the “Hands On Excel” workbook. A Windows Toolkit for ISVs, developers only, runs $40.00. Employees got a window of opportunity, and it was cheap.

The rest of the sheet is a tour of what Microsoft sold beyond Windows and Office. FORTRAN is $30.00 for MS-DOS and Xenix 286, $20.00 on the Macintosh and $10.00 for the Softcard. COBOL is $25.00 for MS-DOS and $20.00 for Softcard, and a LISP for MS-DOS is $30.00. On the hardware side, the Mach 10 board is $185.00 with Windows or $130.00 alone, and the Bus Mouse is $40.00 for IBM, with the Inport Mouse at $30.00.

Chen annotates a few. “Flight Simulator is probably Microsoft’s oldest continuing product,” he writes. Fortran gets a shrug: it “was succeeded much later by Fortran PowerStation, which was not a resounding success.” The Mach 10 gets the same treatment: “The Mach 10 was not very successful either.” (Even the price list has reviews.)

He is also not doing the math for you: “Use your inflation calculators to figure out how much those prices translate into today’s dollars.” Fair enough. A sticker that says $10 in 1987 and a sticker that says $10 now are not the same sticker, but the sticker is exactly the point of the sheet.

Chen explains one item that would stump most readers, the A.L.D.S., “the Assembly Language Development System, a software development system for CP/M.” He tosses in a closing observation about the Softcard: “It looks like a good number of programming languages were available in a Softcard edition.” And he says there are more pages for Microsoft Press books that he “didn’t bother to reproduce here.”

Pricing sheets like this are a cheap way to see what a company thought it was. In 1987 Microsoft’s list reads like a software shop that also sold a mouse, a card and an Excel for the Mac, and none of those prices hints at the empire the same logos would build.

Page two of the scan is dated May 4, 1897. Nobody patched it.