On 11/15/11 2:21 PM, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 12:25, Raymond Toy <toy.raymond at gmail.com
> <mailto: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
>
I don't recall the mit-ml cost. That was probably magnetic core memory,
like 1 micro-second access time.
There's got to be gobs of historical info on the internet. Dunno about
prices exactly. I think that in 1978 the first vax 11/780 at Berkeley
(Ernie CoVax) cost about $250,000. Of that, perhaps $50k was for a very
wide versatec dot printer that was intended for IC layouts. I suspect
Ernie had about 512k bytes of memory.