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Order of Magnitude Per Decade Graph

My first re-statement of Moore's was that the real market and sociological effect was to reduce the price of computers by an order of magnitude per decade. Something along the lines of: "it was millions for mainframes in the 60's, hundreds of thousands for PDPs and VAXes in the 70's, tens thousand for early PCs like the HP 9000's, then thousands, now hundreds". It does indicate something about the minimum you had to pay to get some work done, but since they all service different numbers of terminals or had whole different functions, it's basically rubbish.

© Roy Brander, P.Eng 2007