Not to mention all the boards that the CPUs and RAM took up. Here's a nice photo of the insides of a VAX 11/780 - if you enlarge it all the way you can see the annotations showing which boards do what: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/SPEC-1_V...
Note that those 16 huge memory boards each held 256K (kilobytes!) for a total of 4M of RAM.
When the alternative is nothing or paying a lot of money for something you need to make a lot of money, people will pay a lot of money. It still crazy though. The 80s don't seem that long ago.
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That is crazy, the amount of space a network adapter took up.
First PC network card was only slightly smaller :)
3Com 10Mbps Ethernet 3C500 aka IBM Ethernet (IE) aka EtherLink from October 1982
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a03cac_005e3e9eb62b47c292...
And there were a few more boards for the disk controller, and another couple for the display controller…
Not to mention all the boards that the CPUs and RAM took up. Here's a nice photo of the insides of a VAX 11/780 - if you enlarge it all the way you can see the annotations showing which boards do what: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/SPEC-1_V...
Note that those 16 huge memory boards each held 256K (kilobytes!) for a total of 4M of RAM.
Photo with people to show size of cabinets: https://photovault.com/363660
It’s always surprising to look back at these things, because it hardly seems like it would be economical to build and deliver such a huge monstrosity.
When the alternative is nothing or paying a lot of money for something you need to make a lot of money, people will pay a lot of money. It still crazy though. The 80s don't seem that long ago.