Purchasing an IBM 7070 new, back in the 1950s, was a much bigger investment, at $813,000.

That’s USD $8.79 M in today’s dollars (i.e. inflation adjusted).

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldOPM
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      3 months ago

      Or a very expensive hobby.

      I am assuming it’s Paul Allen’s grandchildren who are selling his “collectibles” as they don’t share Allen’s interests.

    • cows_are_underrated@feddit.org
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      3 months ago

      Idk if it still works, but the computing power probably isn’t enough to rub modern Programms(ignoring that architecture propably changed too).

      • CrayonRosary@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Probably? It ran software encoded on punch cards, only had ~98 KB of RAM (see note). It didn’t even store numbers in binary!

        I’m sorry. I just found it really funny that you think there’s even a tiny chance it could run anything you would call modern software.

        Note: It had at most 9,990 words of memory, and a decimal word was a 5 bit value plus a 5 bit header indicating whether it’s positive or negative, or if it was alphanumeric instead.