[email protected] (zMan) writes: > I remember my father telling me that core -- REAL memory, a MAN'S memory > (yeah, yeah, sexist) -- was $1/byte. Obviously that would have changed by > the time it all went solid-state, but does anyone remember whether this was > correct or not?
originally $1/bit http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/253 magnetic-core http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory By the late 1950s industrial plants had been set up in the Far East to build core. Inside, hundreds of workers strung cores for low pay. This lowered the cost of core to the point where it became largely universal as main memory by the early 1960s, replacing both inexpensive low-performance drum memory and costly high-performance systems using vacuum tubes, and later transistors, as memory. The cost of core memory declined sharply over the lifetime of the technology: costs began at roughly US$1.00 per bit and dropped to roughly US$0.01 per bit. Core was replaced by integrated semiconductor RAM chips in the 1970s. ... snip ... say from about $10/byte to 10cents/byte ... so would have been around $1/byte sometime in that period ... a mbyte of 360/67 (same as 360/65, may have been around a million (except it was in the era that ibm rented/leased, not sold) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_67 a little drift, ref from above, https://1a9f2076-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/michiganterminalsystem/documentation/documents/IBM360-67RefCard.pdf I still have 360/67 "blue card" ... except it is "stamped" with the name of former coworker and one of the inventors of GML (at the science center in 1969): http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/folds.jpg While an undergraduate ... I had been brought in as one of the first employees of BCS, boeing consolidating its dataprocessing into a separate business unit ... helping to monetize its investment, sort of early cloud computing (including being able to market services to non-boeing entities). that summer 360/65s were arriving at the renton datacenter faster than they could be installed ... pieces of 360/65 constantly being staged in the hallways around the machine room. claims was there was something like $300m of 360s in the renton datacenter (or $2B 2014 inflation adjusted dollars) as an aside, total 1qtr2014 mainframe processor sales works out to a little less than $2B/annum. -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
