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Comment on Alan Kay answers “What was it like to be at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited?”parent

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One of the early goals for workstations was a "3M" machine - a megabyte of RAM, a megapixel of display, and a megahertz instruction rate. That was about the point at which GUI workstations started to be really useful. The Alto and the original Mac were both below that level. The Apollo Domain, the Sun I, and the Macintosh II were slightly above it.

(The price of RAM was a big problem in those days. All the early DOS machines and Macs were RAM-starved. The workstation people plowed through that problem with money, and RAM was a big fraction of machine cost. Now it takes a gigabyte to run Hello World, but, whatever.)

I think it was MIPS[0] rather than Mhz.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#MIPS

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