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From: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
To: Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>
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Subject: Re: [TUHS] PC Unix (had been How to Kill a Technical Conference
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On Sat, Apr 10, 2021 at 11:12:51AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 11:34 PM Ed Bradford <egbegb2@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Why did a Ph.D., an academic, and a computer scientist not know about UNIX
> > in 1974 or so? 1976? In 1976, some (many?) universities had source code.
> >
> 
> 4.) Fifth and Sixth Edition of Unix was $150 for university but to run it,
> it took a larger at least 11/40 or 45, with a minimum of 64Kbytes to boot
> and really need the full 256Kbytes to run acceptably and the cost of a 2.5M
> byte RK05 disk was much greater per byte than tape -- thus the base system
> it took to run it was at least $60K (in 1975 dollars) and typically cost
> about two to four times that in practice.   Remember the cost of
> acquisition of the HW dominated many (most) choices.

It was around 1983 or so when I bought a CP/M system, I think an
Okidata.  It was a weird, but fun, machine, had a printer built
into the base behind the keyboard, dual 5" floppies, 128K less
the bitmapped color display.  $2000.

It was slow but dramatically faster than 1/32-164th of a 1MB VAX 780.