CD-i member cdifan shares some history about the times of DVC development in 1993, in times of the CD-i 180 authoring player.
"... Developing for CD-i was very capital-intensive in those days (I'm talking 1993/1994), before that it would have been even worse as I think the 18x sets were even more expensive. Philips had a "WORM burning" service in those days, you needed to ship them a HD or ExaByte tape. When DVC came along the 18x was being phased out and replaced by the 605 as development and reference platform. It was still hard, there were almost no PC tools, everything was for Suns only. We initially received DVC's with ROM revision 1.1 I believe and manually replaced those ROMs once or twice when Philips sent us new ones. The first DVC I worked with did not even have the extra 1MB RAM...."
[Thanks, cdifan]