On Sat, 10 Dec 2005 13:27:09 GMT, Bill Schwab
wrote:

John,

If you can believe it, I paid 27,500.00 for a computer and Easy Cam from
Bridgeport in addition to the machine tool.
The computer ran CPM 86 and I don't remember it having a hard drive at all.
Maybe it did.


The price was not all that crazy when you think about the size of the
market. Also, the A/D hardware that would be required was not nearly so
common as it is now. If it helps any, I recall hearing of someone
paying almost that much for amounts to Fred Flintstone's idea of a
calculator; IIRC, that was c 1970.

I know of a rather good mathematics department that had a Monroe
programmable calculator (computer) by 1966 that cost that much in
1966 dollars.
This looks very similar IIRC:
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/ht...epic_3000.html

Noted as having "delay line memory":
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/ht...hnologies.html

[
In a delay line memory the 1's and 0's of the binary data are
converted to acoustic pulses at one end of a coil of wire. These
acoustic pulses travel at the speed of sound in the wire to the other
end where they are converted back to an electrical signal and with
amplification back into the original binary data. The binary data is
effectively "stored" on the wire during the fraction of a second that
the pulses take to travel the length of the wire. By continuously
feeding the binary data back into the delay line a quantity of data
can be stored indefinitely, or can be overwritten by new data.

In practice, delay line memories usually operate in torsion mode
rather than compressive mode.
]

I did not know of that .....
--
Cliff