How Much was a CDC 1604 in the 60's? 41
An Oxymoran asks: "Greetings Slashdot. A colleague, that is sadly preparing an obituary for a late, great scientist, recently posed the following question: How much did a Control Data Corporation (CDC; Cray predecessor) 1604 cost in the late 60's? Apparently the 1604's controller computer, the 160, cost ~$100K. However, I have failed to turn up a price for the 1604. I would be highly appreciative of any estimates of 1604 prices from the 60's that the collective Slashdot genius can unearth. Thank you."
Yes.... (Score:2, Informative)
It was $750,000 (Score:5, Informative)
The full CDC 6600 was $4,500,000. (Score:4, Informative)
I remember the CDC 6600 as being $4,500,000 when it was newly introduced. So, the $1 million listed is only for the CPU module. An actual system required maybe 22 "peripheral processors" to handle IO and printing. Then there were hard drives, tape drives, the main console, and card readers.
The CDC 6600 had a 60-bit word. Memory amounts were expressed in octal. Memory was extremely expensive. If the 6600 had 100,000 octal bytes of memory your organization was rich.