[rtomek at ceti.pl: Re: Arduino frustrations: C is not a higher-order language, and timing is not an optimization]

[Dave Long]

> something comparable to PDP-10 or similar machine would probably  
> make me happy, especially for few tens of dollars.


just for comparison, to see how far we've come (alternatively, how  
far the h/w guys have come relative to s/w!):

Ritchie & Thompson, "The UNIX Time-Sharing System", C. of the ACM 1974
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/cacm.html
> Perhaps the most important achievement of Unix is to demonstrate  
> that a powerful operating system for interactive use need not be  
> expensive either in equipment or in human effort: it can run on  
> hardware costing as little as $40,000, and less than two man-years  
> were spent on the main system software.

a -10 looks to have been about 5 times the cost of an -11, and with a  
quick detour through:

http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/

a 40k PDP-11 in 1971 USD is on the order of a couple hundred K 2010  
USD, which would put the PDP-10's at roughly 1M current USD.

-Dave