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)
Re:Yes.... (Score:3, Funny)
It was $750,000 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It was $750,000 (Score:5, Interesting)
A few references (Score:3, Interesting)
This [google.com] quotes $34,000/mo.
Maybe a post to comp.sys.cdc will get you some answers?
Do I hear 1.2 million? (Score:2, Interesting)
$1.2 million (Score:1, Interesting)
$1.2 million.
Please learn to use Google: '"cdc 1604" cost'
Don't forget. (Score:1)
that brings up another question (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:that brings up another question (Score:3, Funny)
About 36 years since the late 60's, that's 24 'Moore's Law' periods (18 mos.), 2^24 == 16M, and you're running windows, so we divide by 16 to get one million.
Re:that brings up another question (Score:1)
I found an old TV transcript that should help... (Score:5, Funny)
The CDC 1604 can be yours for five easy payments of just $299,999! Just call the number on your screen!
BUT WAIT!
If you order the revolutionary new CDC 1604 within the next seven minutes, we'll knock one full payment off the purchase price! That's right, this revolutionary new computing technology can be yours for just four easy payments of just $299,999! Call now, operators are standing by!
Re:I found an old TV transcript that should help.. (Score:3, Funny)
and it WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!
Just look at these people who bought one - don't you want to be like them?Re:I found an old TV transcript that should help.. (Score:1)
CALL WITHIN THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES AND GET A SECOND Cray Supercomputer ABSOLUTELY free... BUT wait, there's more. You also get a Sun Ultra 5 workstation. Regardless of whether you decide to keep the Cray Supercomputer, the Ultra 5 is yours to keep as a complementary gift.
CDC Cyber (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:CDC Cyber (Score:1)
Re:CDC Cyber (Score:2)
When I was in school, we used clay tablets for cards. We had to use a cuneiform stylus, and if we ever messed up, the instructor would show us the meaning of "punch" card. And we didn't have a card sorter; we'd wake up before we went to sleep to sort cards for the NSA, and if we ever got one out of order, they'd dequeue all our batch jobs!
Re:CDC Cyber (Score:1)
"You had zeroes? You were lucky. We had to make do with the letter 'o'..."
Re:CDC Cyber (Score:1)
If you knew how to read the holes on said 'account' card you could make a replacement card with someone else's account number on it, to run, say, your big compute-intensive job and use up their time.
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.
Call Cray (Score:2)
Good luck.
Re:Call Cray (Score:1)
Re: How Much was a CDC 1604 in the 60's? (Score:1)
CDC never seriously marketed the computer as a minicomputer, but a few were sold at a price of over 100,000. Most importantly was that it influenced others to build small computers. Recall that the first computer designs were for word lengths of 40 bits. IBM and Univac were building 36 -bit computers
But hey, if you are an antique collector, you can get framed CDC Console Disk Controller at here [newbegin.com] [NewBegin] (with pictures)
Re: How Much was a CDC 1604 in the 60's? (Score:1)
Pre-announcement for NetBSD for CDC1604 (Score:2, Funny)
I then compiled Apache, loaded up some web pages that I copied off the Internet, and put up a site. You can see it at www.cnn.com
Moderate this "-1 April" hahahahaha
Thomas
Re:Pre-announcement for NetBSD for CDC1604 (Score:1)
Cray predecessor??? (Score:1)
A little more accuracy is warranted on a site purported to be technically alert.
Re:Cray predecessor??? (Score:1)
Control Data Systems was later bought by British Telecom and became (part of?) Syntegra [syntegra.com].
Read more about it here. [wikipedia.org]
Off Topic (Score:1)
Note: not the entire company was bought, infact they went from Control Data Corporation to Control Data Systems. They even did some of the wiring for Target stores across the state of Michigan (but not for there own computer systems)
Re:CDC Cyber 730D price (Score:2)
You want the CDC 6600, I think, (Score:2)
The CDC 6600 had all the modern supercomputer stuff. It was a superscalar RISC machine, with lots of registers and instruction-level parallelism. This in the 1960s.
I/O was shoved off to ten "peripheral processors", which were really one CPU with hardware multiprogramming emulating ten slower machines. The I/O processors handled all the peripherals. The I/O processo