5-10K for a grad student seems low for the late ‘70s.  I was an RA at Stanford then and they paid about $950/month.  The loaded cost would have been about twice that.

My lab had an 11/34 with V7 and we considered ourselves quite well off.

-L

On 2018, Jun 16, at 10:10 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

Thanks, I thought it was  about 10 years earlier.   It means that the 16 bit systems were  definitely the norm and the 32 bit system were well under design and the micros already birthed.  That said, as I pointed out in my paper last summer, in 1977, a PDP-11 that was able to run UNIX (11/34 with max memory) ran between $50-150K depending how it was configured and an 11/70 was closer to $250K.   To scale, In 2017 dollars, we calculated that comes to $208K/$622K/$1M and as I also pointed out, a graduate researcher in those days cost about $5-$10K per year.

ᐧ