Price/Performance of time

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

>Did the computer you were hooking it up to even have 16MB of main  
>memory in it?

Of course not.

I had it hooked up to a VAX 11/780 that was running Unix System 3 from
Bell Labs.  At first we only had 1 MB of RAM, but I upgraded that to 4
MB (the max you could have with that system).

If I had bought the RAM from DEC it would have been $23K per MB.  As it
was I bought it from National Semiconductor for $1K per MB.

And I had about 30 engineers logged into that Unix system all the time.

I must admit that groff(1)ing goes much faster on modern-day machines
than troff(1) did, but everything else seems to take the same amount of
time.

md