Does anyone know what that characteristic smell is DEC equipment has? It's different from the characteristic smell of (for example) Sun equipment. Rainbow's smell like VAXen.
> It started at $27,000 [in 2026 dollars about $282,000], a surprisingly low cost for the era, and about a thousand were sold.
To give you a sense of scale, in 1963 when the first PDP8 was launched at $27k, here in the UK the very first JCB 3C backhoe loader was launched at around £2500 - roughly a quarter of the price of a PDP8 in real terms, or about three year's salary for its driver.
So think in terms of how much "You know what? It'd save us so much time and money to just buy ourselves one of *these* things" you could buy yourself with the money :-)
I was also thinking about the prices and what problems they were being used for to motivate the investment.
It then occurred to me that loaded Mac Studios and DGX Stations have some comparability in CAPEX scale. Here are some other prices for example:
> The VT278 started at $6,795 [$23,700].”
> This was sold as the DECmate III+ for $5145 [$15,400] alongside the standard III.
> The VAXmate finally hit the market in September 1986 starting at $4045 [$12,100].
> For the back end DEC announced a turn-key MicroVAX II system with 5MB of RAM, Ethernet, 16 ports and a 30-seat ALL-IN-1 plus WPS wordprocessing starting at $81,160 [$243,000].
Interesting fact about the PDP-8/S, which was the horrendously slow serial version.
It was supposedly the first computer sold to a private individual instead of business or academia. The purchaser was composer Peter Zinovieff, who used it in the electronic music studio he was building in his home. He paid for it by pawning his (aristocratic) wife's tiara. (They later divorced.)
Here it is in the racks at the back, next to a PDP-8/I which he bought later, and some of the synths and other products the company he created started selling soon after.
This was 1971. Computer control of analog synths, sampling, and video-to-sound with real time FFTs (from additional hardware) were years ahead of what Rest of World was doing then.
spankibalt | 10 hours ago
→ [https://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=144]
nickdothutton | 9 hours ago
bigfatkitten | 8 hours ago
forinti | 5 hours ago
skinwill | 2 hours ago
ErroneousBosh | 7 hours ago
To give you a sense of scale, in 1963 when the first PDP8 was launched at $27k, here in the UK the very first JCB 3C backhoe loader was launched at around £2500 - roughly a quarter of the price of a PDP8 in real terms, or about three year's salary for its driver.
So think in terms of how much "You know what? It'd save us so much time and money to just buy ourselves one of *these* things" you could buy yourself with the money :-)
alchemist1e9 | 4 hours ago
It then occurred to me that loaded Mac Studios and DGX Stations have some comparability in CAPEX scale. Here are some other prices for example:
> The VT278 started at $6,795 [$23,700].”
> This was sold as the DECmate III+ for $5145 [$15,400] alongside the standard III.
> The VAXmate finally hit the market in September 1986 starting at $4045 [$12,100].
> For the back end DEC announced a turn-key MicroVAX II system with 5MB of RAM, Ethernet, 16 ports and a 30-seat ALL-IN-1 plus WPS wordprocessing starting at $81,160 [$243,000].
TheOtherHobbes | 6 hours ago
It was supposedly the first computer sold to a private individual instead of business or academia. The purchaser was composer Peter Zinovieff, who used it in the electronic music studio he was building in his home. He paid for it by pawning his (aristocratic) wife's tiara. (They later divorced.)
Here it is in the racks at the back, next to a PDP-8/I which he bought later, and some of the synths and other products the company he created started selling soon after.
https://historyofinformation.com/images/Screen_Shot_2020-09-...
This was 1971. Computer control of analog synths, sampling, and video-to-sound with real time FFTs (from additional hardware) were years ahead of what Rest of World was doing then.