>> We added 1MB of memory to an IBM 370/168 in the mid 70s.  Price? $50000.
>
> Ouch! o_O
>
> It still somewhat blows my mind that you could do anything useful with so 
> little memory.

You could do useful stuff with *far* less.

> Wow. I had no idea it persisted that long. In the mid 1980s, I had a C64 
> to play with, which stored data on audio tape - for more data than any 
> stack of punch cards. And I don't think the C64 was even particularly 
> expensive... (I know of a few people who actually used the C64 for work 
> purposes, would you believe.)

I can remember when I was younger (mid 80s) my dad writing a program to 
simulate the 2D flow of cylindrical shaped objects into different shaped 
channels (with graphics) - that was with 32K of RAM.  Useful work (even if 
it took about 10 seconds to eventually figure out where each one went!), and 
I'm sure there are loads more examples of doing useful stuff with just a few 
KB of RAM.

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