On Sat, Apr 10, 2021 at 11:12:51AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
On Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 11:34 PM Ed Bradford
<egbegb2(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Why did a Ph.D., an academic, and a computer
scientist not know about UNIX
in 1974 or so? 1976? In 1976, some (many?) universities had source code.
4.) Fifth and Sixth Edition of Unix was $150 for university but to run it,
it took a larger at least 11/40 or 45, with a minimum of 64Kbytes to boot
and really need the full 256Kbytes to run acceptably and the cost of a 2.5M
byte RK05 disk was much greater per byte than tape -- thus the base system
it took to run it was at least $60K (in 1975 dollars) and typically cost
about two to four times that in practice. Remember the cost of
acquisition of the HW dominated many (most) choices.
It was around 1983 or so when I bought a CP/M system, I think an
Okidata. It was a weird, but fun, machine, had a printer built
into the base behind the keyboard, dual 5" floppies, 128K less
the bitmapped color display. $2000.
It was slow but dramatically faster than 1/32-164th of a 1MB VAX 780.