I have $4M worth of RAM and $6M in Hard Drives...

[buzzsmith]

...in 1985 prices!

My wife and I had a brief conversation the other day about how fast technology advances (video chatting via smartphones, etc.) which led me to think about the economics of the advances.

If my math is correct...

I upgraded my 128k original Macintosh in 1985 to 1 meg of RAM for $500.00.
(I waited until 3rd party RAM was available...Apple originally wanted $1,000.)

So, I multiplied 1 meg @ $500.00 by 1000 to get the cost per gigabyte...$500,000 and then multiplied that by my current memory of 8 gigs to arrive at $4,000,000!

On the hard drives, a studio contemporary of mine was the first to get a 1 gig (external) hard drive for $2,000. I now have about 3000 gigs of storage available, so multiplying $2,000 by 3,000 equals $6,000,000!

I know, too much time on my hands...

Buzzy

[bayswater]

It's amazing isn't it. I upgraded an IBM PC in 1983 from 64K to 256K at a cost of $4M per GB, so RAM prices had dropped 92% between then and when you upgraded your Mac.

In early 90s I worked on project to build a data warehouse. We bought a 500G drive for about $6M, and had to build a special room and hire two technicians to keep it running 24 hours. The supplier told us we didn't need their 1 terabyte model, because only Walmart would ever have enough data to need that much space.

[twistedtom]

To funny guys! Bayswater that is incredible!

In the early 60's when magnetic donuts were the memory in use it cost $1K per 1K of memory. So with that in mind My 16Gb's of ram is 16 Billon bucks. One must think how slow Magnetic donuts were.


In 1946 this was built.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

The references by Rojas and Hashagen (or Wilkes)[8] give more details about the times for operations, which differ somewhat from those stated above. The basic machine cycle was 200 microseconds (20 cycles of the 100 kHz clock in the cycling unit), or 5,000 cycles per second for operations on the 10-digit numbers. In one of these cycles, ENIAC could write a number to a register, read a number from a register, or add/subtract two numbers. A multiplication of a 10-digit number by a d-digit number (for d up to 10) took d+4 cycles, so a 10- by 10-digit multiplication took 14 cycles, or 2800 microseconds—a rate of 357 per second. If one of the numbers had fewer than 10 digits, the operation was faster. Division and square roots took 13(d+1) cycles, where d is the number of digits in the result (quotient or square root). So a division or square root took up to 143 cycles, or 28,600 microseconds—a rate of 35 per second. (Wilkes 1956:20[8] states that a division with a 10 digit quotient required 6 milliseconds.) If the result had fewer than ten digits, it was obtained faster.
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