Abstract The characteristics and costs of minicomputers are discussed along with peripherals, time-sharing, and turnkey systems. The article concludes with a survey of over 100 small computer systems.
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Interesting article from 1970. Unfortunately it is 100% US focused. There were other interesting systems available at the time (with time sharing, virtual memory, floating point etc).
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For the UK it would be nice to see prices (in US Dollars) of mini computers from the UK and Europe.
It is interesting to see the price of the PDP8/e compared to other machines, the extra 4 or 6 bits seems
to add 50% more to the cost of the base unit of other computer sizes. No 20 bit computers listed.
For a table of offerings, without prices, from UK outfits, see p117 of Ross Hamilton’s thesis:
But the UK is again only part of the story… I would hazard that many microcomputer offerings were sold mostly in their home countries. More research would be needed…
Norsk Data, Regnecentralen, Dansk Data Elektronik a little later, Philips with the P800. For France, see here perhaps. Nixdorf perhaps. It seems Siemens licensed minicomputer technology from RCA.
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BCL 's page is here:
http://www.bcl-computers.org.uk/index.htm
They have a UK minicomputer price list for 1973. A Pound was about 2.4 US dollars then.
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