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Comment on What Have We Learned from the PDP-11?

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4096 word memory contained 16 million cores

No, no. 4096*16 = 65536 bits.

16 million cores would be 2 megabytes. An IBM mainframe of the early 1970s might have that much storage, and the cost would be about $1 million. IBM figured out how to weave core memory on a power loom, which gave them a big cost advantage for a while.

Yes - we bought 1.5 megabyte of core for our Burroughs 6700 in the late 70s, we paid NZ$1M for ours (in those days ~US$1.25M, before the Muldoon NZ$ crash of the mid 80s)

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