Regarding cuts, yes. We had to do with less year-over-year. From Hasselmo's 1991 State of the U address:
> """We lost at least 5 million to inflation, and 6 million through a base cut this year. In addition to a potential 5 million loss to inflation next year again, the Governor's vetoes of IT and systemwide special appropriations cut another 3 million in funding -- for which we are aggressively seeking full restoration."""
The mainframe teams had a harder time of things. For Microcomputers we were lucky - our hardware costs decreased and we had a deal with the University Bookstore to support their computer hardware sales.
That stuff was still expensive. Here's some educational pricing for a workstation with substantial education discount in 1994.
list discount
IBM model 25T 495 400.00
80Mhz upgrade 500 $ 953.50
64MB upgrade $ 912.00
2GB disk upgrade $ 463.00
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10728.50