
What a DEC-20 Cost in 1976 (2007) - cpach
http://dec20.blogspot.com/2007/11/heres-what-dec-20-cost-in-1976.html
======
imglorp
My first encounter with a DEC-20 was MACLISP for an AI class. Of course, the
first thing you write is factorial, but I forgot the termination condition.
Before I figured out why it was taking so long and send a brk, my CPU quota
for the semester got consumed and TOPS kicked me off and locked me out.
Luckily the dept secretary took pity and gave me some more time.

We also had APL for a numerical methods class on that system. Yes, we had some
terminals with the special APL symbols; I think they were LA-36's.

[http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/la36.html](http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/la36.html)

~~~
nickpsecurity
Probably where the trick of adding a counter to loops and stuff to ensure
termination came from. People going over their hardware budget back in the
day.

~~~
jacquesm
A termination guarantee is still good practice.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I agree. Just wondered if that's where it originally came from. Could've been
just from formal methods with difficulty of doing termination proofs.

~~~
jacquesm
My money would be on latency guarantees. If you add up the longest path
through all your loops and one of them is a while(1) then you can no longer
give any guarantees for any latency at all.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Interesting possibility.

------
sailfast
I'd be interested to see something like this but rather than a straight cost
comparison, an analysis of what it got you in the marketplace. If you had this
kind of compute power in 1976, what could you do that your competitors could
not, and what was the multiplier to the business. With computing ubiquitous
now the hardware doesn't always provide you with a significant competitive
advantage, but I can imagine in 1976 you could own an industry that way, and
$300K may have seemed like a steal.

EDIT: The post might be something like: "Why we bought a DEC for 300K and
never thought twice about it"

~~~
marshray
> what could you do that your competitors could not

Input customer orders, schedule production, track inventory, print shipping
labels, do accounting, send invoices, and type memos... _all in one integrated
system_.

And if you had multiple offices, they could each have one and they could
exchange data throughout the day.

It was truly a revolution in productivity.

------
ratsmack
That is about the same price as the VAX 11/780 we bought in 1979 (serial
number 13) to run CAD/CAM software. I remember the price was around $350K,
which included three RM80 drives, a vacuum column 9-track tape drive and giant
battery backup. We added third party memory to bring it up to 4MB and a 40
port Emulux serial interface. It was just a few years later that a 16Mhz i386
was as fast as this system.

~~~
hga
_It was just a few years later that a 16Mhz i386 was as fast as this system._

Wouldn't that be more like 8 years later? 1986 for the 12MHz release
(originally targeted at 16), add at least a year to get up in speed and out in
people's hands. And didn't the VAX have a much faster disk system, and few
i386's tape backup?

BTW, how reliable were your RM80s?

~~~
ratsmack
When you're having a good time a "few years" is pretty short. :-)

Our RM80's were trouble free from what I can remember. We had an air
conditioned, electrostatic filtered clean room for our systems which also
included some PDP11's and PDP11/40's with RL02's and RK07 disk drives. The
room had very limited access and you had to wear booties. The only time we
lost a drive is when one of the RK07's went crazy, slamming the heads against
the hard stops causing the heads to crash onto the disk.

~~~
linker3000
The company at which I was working purchased a second hand VAX 11/750 system
around 1984 and a Digital engineer came in to help us re-commission it.

Everything went well until the RM05 (256MB) disk pack performed a random-seek
confidence test; it was then that we discovered that its feet had not been
screwed down to the floor and the whole unit started to breakdance around the
computer room like a deranged washing machine. Two of us leapt at the unit and
held it down until the test completed.

~~~
aswanson
Break dancing humans and RAM. The 80s were awesome.

~~~
grkvlt
Nope, _Disk_ \- That 256MB was spinning platters. At the time you would kill
for 256MB of RAM, I guess ;)

------
captaincrowbar
There's a quote I heard somewhere: "A given speed of computer is available
from Cray in 1980 for $10,000,000, from Sun in 1990 for $100,000, from Dell in
2000 for $1000, and from Oxfam in 2010 for $10."

~~~
donatj
I feel like the thousand dollar Dell was actually profoundly more powerful.

~~~
rbanffy
Not really. It probably spent most of the CPU cycles waiting for IO and a
little less time waiting for memory. Also, its SIMD units were probably
limited in comparison with what Cray was doing 20 years prior.

As for the Sun, using SCSI disks and a decent OS more or less compensated for
limitations similar to Dell's circa 2000 PC.

------
karavelov
That price included "Six months on-site resident software specialist"

------
ChuckMcM
Loved how you could run your business with 2 x 100MB of hard drive space
initially. That system though sounds similar to the ones we had at USC in the
late 70's early 80's. The student CS program was taught using two of the named
"JUGHEAD" and "ARCHIE" with a giant 120 port terminal multiplexer (which was
basically a PDP-11/40 running a dedicated instance of RSX-11 doing nothing but
connecting individual VT52's and VT100s.

------
TheOtherHobbes
36-bit processor, 25MHz clock, 128K system memory, 100MB drives, air-
conditioned room...

Totally killed by a modern $5 Pi Zero.

If you took a Pi back in time no one would know what to do with it. Linux
would be recognisable, Ethernet would be recognised by Xerox Parc and a few
experts, and only at 10 MB/s - but USB, HDMI, SC cards, the SoC, and the web
would all look like advanced alien technology.

~~~
VLM
A classic display of latency vs bandwidth. The DEC box wins on latency but the
pi wins on bandwidth, for large enough tasks, anyway.

A 2040 was a PDP-10 with a 30 MHz KL processor running around 30 MIPS and
TOPS-20 (the source of the "20" in the name) a quarter century ago.

30e6 * 60 * 24 * 365 * 25 = about 4 e 14 instructions.

I can't get a straight answer but hundreds of MIPS sounds reasonable for a pi
zero.

4e14 / 500e6 / 60 / 24 / 365 = about a year and a half

So sometime in 2017 a pi zero would finally catch up to a DECSystem-2040 which
had a quarter century head start. Of course the 2040 has been continuously
producing intermediate results for the first 25 years of the "race" while the
pi output no results at all having not being invented yet. Also after 27 or so
years the pi will somewhat surpass the 2040.

Also the IO bandwidth and scalability of old mainframes usually puts newer
hardware to shame. "My calculator has more power than a 1960s NASA mainframe
that sent men to the moon" "Oh so you're saying you've been to Mars, then?"

On one hand, 4e14 instructions executed would have been enough to run entire
civilizations, some years ago. On the other hand, its not enough to boot
modern Windows, although despite the difficulty is none the less not
accomplishing anything in the real world.

~~~
rjsw
I don't think a PDP-10 does all that well on a bandwidth comparison with a
modern system, I would expect something like a Cubietruck with SATA and
Gigabit Ethernet to win fairly easily.

~~~
jacobush
But ... the parent suggests a Pi wins on bandwidth.

~~~
linker3000
Did any of the computing magazines of the era feature a free DEC-20 on the
cover? Just wondering!

~~~
VLM
Sort of. About 30+ years ago the world was absolutely awash in Compuserve
free/demo accounts, included in software boxes and probably magazines. Wish I
could find an old 80micro magazine cover on archive.org to document this
aspect of the past. People who lived thru it could verify that free compuserve
accounts were the AOL floppy/CD of an older era.

Compuserve in say 1983 was a DEC service bureau moonlighting at night as a
very expensive per hour super BBS system. Like $5/hr at 300 baud. And yes it
was a network of PDP-10s as per the linked article (although I seem to
remember KI processors not KL's)

~~~
salgernon
75460,1375

Why did you make me remember that!

We used compuserve to support our (retail, boxed Mac) software. Then we had to
expand to AOL to cover "the outsiders". And then... Eternal September.

(Some day, "like us on Facebook" will be as obsolete as "AOL keyword BLAH",
which you can still see at the ending credits of movies from the 90s. I don't
recall a similar push for compuserve.)

------
timonoko
I remember that bare-bones Nova-1200 costed exactly 10 times more than
Fiat-600 automobile in 1972 (70,000 and 7,000 Finnish markkas (1 Fmk was 3
USdollars) and with heavy import taxation).

I had both some years later. Both equally out-of-date. The car actually fell
apart somewhat catastrophically on the road in 1982, because no rust-proofing.

------
ctstover
A quick search puts 350k in 1976USD at about 1.5m 2015USD.

------
nickpsecurity
So, they want $300,000+ for a system and only offer a 90-day warranty? That's
when you know it's going to be a piece of s __*. Haha.

