mainframes and other stuff

[John Foust]

At 12:32 PM 11/24/2014, you wrote:
> To give a more modern
>perspective on things - how much gold do you think is in a Pentium Pro
>microprocessor? Thick plate over a large surface area...go look it up,
>and you will probably be surprised. Then do some back of the napkin
>calculations on the surface area of the PPro, compared to thousands
>upon thousands of pins in a 2075...

Let's say that a Pentium Pro has a third of a gram; a troy ounce is
31.1 grams; so 94 Pentium Pro to the troy ounce; 4.5 pounds is about
65 troy ounces; so 6,182 Pentium Pro might have that much gold.

The price of gold was still $35 a troy ounce in 1970; so that S/360's 
gold cost about $2,300 (or what feels like about $14,000 today.)  
In 2013 at $1,200 an ounce, that S/360's gold was worth $78,720.

- John