Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeffkop
Fantastic input into the thread Gary, I feel older though for the tirp down memory lane. In stark contrast, I remember how cutting edge all these magazines and their articles was at the time, and also how you felt like you were an alien becuase you played with this stuff and heaven forbid, actually understood it. It amazes me how the basics of computing havnt changed a great deal since these days either.
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Thank you Jeff & Simon,
This advertisement from 1977 offered 16384 bytes of DRAM for US$485 -
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/a...se.php?a=91178
That works out at US$0.0296 a byte (i.e. approximately 3 cents a byte).
Many IceInSpace readers will have 4GB or more of DRAM loaded in their machines
these days.
It is therefore interesting to reflect how much 4GB of memory would have cost
in late 1977 if one had purchased it in the same form as appeared in the
advertisement.
Firstly, it would equate to 262,144 of those memory cards and would have cost
in excess of a staggering US$127.1 million dollars.
The 1977 board is quoted as consuming 5 watts. 262,144 boards would have consumed 1.31 Megawatts.
If one was willing to pay proportionally more for access speed, so for example,
one was prepared to pay twice as much for DRAM's twice as fast and so on,
then a modest speed DRAM today would be at least 35 times faster than its
1977 counterpart on a random access (in reality, the 2011 part achieves
considerably higher transfer rates than this when used in a typical application),
which would further inflate the US$127.1 million dollar figure to
US$4.45 billion.
By comparison, in 1977, Cray Research's first customer paid only US$8.86 million for
their Cray 1 supercomputer which had a 80MHz clock speed but with a vector architecture.
The increases in performance and the phenomenal decreases in price of
computing in a space of only 34 years seem staggering, but when one considers
that this trend is projected to continue for some time, it is positively mind boggling
to say the least what the future holds.
