Gregory's Serverwe ran a $20 million/year in sales (a lot then) business in 1967 with an 8kb computer the size of 2 home freezers. We leased it from UNIVAC for $1400/mth on a 5-year lease. This would be $12,789/mth today or $767,340 total for 60 months
economy of code was key to success for all but basic tasks, and there were a few legendary tricks (a very cool hack in one case) I learned from others.
optimizing code was in such cases cheaper than scaling up capacity