26 Feb
2003
26 Feb
'03
3:04 a.m.
Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
An interesting article. The original sale price in
1960 was $24,500.
The unit also ran off of standard line voltage (110) and required no
additional cooling. It could be moved from any location to any location
and used just about anywhere.
So this begs the question, why did the PDP-8 create the "mini-computer"
class and not this or other machines with similar attributes?
I suspect it was do to that fact "electronic brains" were still thought
in terms of large calculators. Real time control and data processing
were still many years in the future. The PDP-8/S proved that serial
processing of data was too slow for computing in the 1960's.
Considering $5,000 ?? would buy a house in 1960 that still was a very
large amount of $$$. Ben.