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.

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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