Wang Laboratories 4K minicomputer (early-1970s MIT lab purchase)

Opening anecdote about the cost of memory in the early 1970s — $4,000 for 4K of storage, used to set up the contrast with modern computing.

They had mainframe computers though. There was no such thing as a PC, a personal computer. In fact I was the first person in this department to word-process my thesis. My doctoral thesis is right and left justified. I did it on the mainframe computer at MIT, back in the early '70s. When we got a little computer for the lab, it had 4K of storage. It was a Wang computer with 4K of storage. My first word processor had 64K of memory. The original Apple II had 64K. You don't even know what that means today, right? 4K, that's an email. Anyone ever heard of the Wang Center downtown, the big Performing Arts Center? Well, Dr. Wang sold these little computers, which we paid like $4,000 for in 1970 for this 4K computer. If you look at the Moore plots, he was probably a dollar a bit back then for memory. Prices have come down.