Thanks, I thought it was  about 10 years earlier.   It means that the 16
bit systems were  definitely the norm and the 32 bit system were well under
design and the micros already birthed.  That said, as I pointed out in my
paper last summer, in 1977, a PDP-11 that was able to run UNIX (11/34 with
max memory) ran between $50-150K depending how it was configured and an
11/70 was closer to $250K.   To scale, In 2017 dollars, we calculated that
comes to $208K/$622K/$1M and as I also pointed out, a graduate researcher
in those days cost about $5-$10K per year.

ᐧ

On Sat, Jun 16, 2018 at 9:49 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Clem Cole
>
>     > The 8 pretty much had a base price in the $30k range in the mid to
> late
>     > 60s.
>
> His statement was made in 1977 (ironically, the same year as the Apple
> II).
>
> (Not really that relevant, since he was apparently talking about 'smart
> homes'; still, the history of DEC and personal computers is not a happy
> one;
> perhaps why that quotation was taken up.)
>
>     > Later models used TTL and got down to a single 3U 'drawer'.
>
> There was eventually a single-chip micro version, done in the mid-70's; it
> was used in a number of DEC word-processing products.
>
>         Noel
>