[Arny Krueger]

"Keith G" wrote in message

"Arny Krueger" wrote


In 1972 I was an EE undergraduate student, working on a
hybrid computer, which was composed of an analog
computer, a pair of A/D & D/A converters, and a small
digital computer. The A/D - D/A pair was speced to
have true 16 bits monotonicity and accuracy, and a max
200 KHz conversion rate. Price was said to be around
$500,000. The digital computer had 32k bytes of RAM and
an approx 1 Megabyte hard drive. The price was in the
same range.

Hard drive?

Sure. By then hard drives had been around for like 15 years. This one had a
single 14" ferrite-covered aluminum disk in a plastic cartridge.

At exactly that time, my (late) father-in-law was a
Systems Engineer on what was then Europe's largest
'hybrid' digital/analog computer at BAC, Stevenage. It
had 8K of Ram and the only storage medium I ever go to
hear about was tapes...??

We had tapes on larger computers, but this one was about cards, printing and
mountable hard drives.

For a long time the UK has tended to trail the US, particularly in computer
technology. When I was in the biz, we figured 2-3 years, and twice the
price. I'm sure you will take umbridge, but that's how things were in the
late 1980s with our UK subsidiary.