On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 12:25, Raymond Toy <toy.raymond at gmail.com> wrote:
> The good news is of course that by *current* standards, 16MB is tiny; the
>> trivial game FreeCell takes 100MB (!). I can buy 8GB RAM for $50, and it
>> is 1000x faster than the Macsyma group's 2MB RAM that cost $100,000+.
>>
>
> Yow! I knew RAM was expensive back then, but I didn't know how
> expensive! (Is that $100K in current dollars or 60's dollars?)
>
Moore's Law, baby: 8GB/$50 = 160e6 B/$; 2MB/$100k = 20 B/$.
1-(160e6/20)^-(1/(2011-1974)) = 35%/year. For real (inflation-adjusted)
dollars, multiply $100k by 4.6, giving 37.5%/year. Moore's Law is usually
cited as "doubles in 18 months", which is -37%/year.
The $100k+ for 512kW is my vague memory in nominal dollars of the cost of
MIT-ML's enormous :-) core memory in 1974 (?). MIT-ML was the first
dedicated Macsyma machine, bought by a consortium as a shared resource used
across the ARPAnet. Fateman may remember the figures better.
-s