FTR, I think you mean $1 per BYTE. Even by 1960, it was down (!) to $5,242,880 per megabyte. OK, that's $5/byte, but still not a buck a bit. Then: 1965 $2,642,412 1970 $734,003 ...so by 1970 it was only $0.70/byte! A bargain!
These numbers are from https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm, which, alas, is dead but is available on The Wayback Machine. Pretty interesting, too bad the author gave up on it (or, given the historical nature of the data, they probably passed on...) -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Attila Fogarasi Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2026 11:50 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Trivia time to be fair, APL/360 did not use paging, it swapped the workspace (which was limited to 432KB and commonly administered to max 36KB. Remember this was the era when memory cost $1 per bit. Later APL versions used much larger memory sizes. As an aside, APL2 released in 1984 was infamous for heavy SS instruction usage. On Thu, Jul 9, 2026 at 9:51 AM Mike Schwab < [email protected]> wrote: > APL\360 thought no one would ever need 9MB, so they used the top bit > of a 24 bit address field. > > On Wed, Jul 8, 2026 at 6:06 PM Rob Schramm > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > They gave you the proverbial bakers dozen, what more do you need? > > After all "640K ought to be enough for anybody" > > > > Yes.. I am mixing my OS's.. but I thought it was apropos. > > > > Rob > > > > On Fri, Jul 3, 2026, 8:46 PM Paul Gilmartin < > > [email protected]> wrote: > > > > > On Fri, 3 Jul 2026 09:50:05 -0400, Phil Smith III wrote: > > > > > > >What was the only IBM device to have exactly 13 PF keys? > > > > ... > > > Have you never wished for just one more when the others were all > > > in > use? > > > > > > -- > > > gil > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > ---- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access > > > instructions, send email to [email protected] with the > > > message: INFO IBM-MAIN > > > > > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > > -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO > > IBM-MAIN > > > > -- > Mike A Schwab, Springfield IL USA > Where do Forest Rangers go to get away from it all? > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send > email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
