'WOW, That's a beauty!. . .

Dude, I remember a time when 16k of RAM was $500 (>1000 in today's $).

Yes, ***k***.

Floppy drives held 180k, floppies cost $5 each, and were single-sided. So you cut a notch in the other side and flipped it over to use the other side, hence "flippy" (these were the "older" style floppies, which had a softer, non-hard-shelled covering, and were more like stiff paper -- you could use a hole-punch on them to duplicate the notch onto the other side).

My first computer, an Apple ][, bought in 1981, was $2000, had 64k of ram, no monitor (used the TV) and one single-sided floppy, no HD (those were available, $1000 for 5mb).

Or, for even more perspective:

1978. CS visit from local college to NASA in Cape Kennedy. Walk through double doors into a room, fifteen washing machines on one side, fifteen washing machines on the other, raised flooring for additional cooling. Approx. cost of washing machines, $100k+ each, so total cost of washing machines, ca. $3 million.

The washing machines are hard drives. Total capacity, *3* Gigabytes. Waaaaowwww!!!.

Yes, I, too, have a bigger memory chip in my phone, and if I had an HD with only 3 GBs on it, I'd tear it apart for refrigerator magnets (the magnets used in the drive motors are great for that), 'cause it's not even worth using. Heck, I'd tear apart one with 10x that.

So from $3,000,000 to virtually worthless in 30 years.

But at the time, that was better than what got us to the moon. So keep THAT in perspective, too.

Especially when some IDIOT engineer/manager working at NASA tells you *today* that "we couldn't get to the moon in 10 years even if we seriously wanted to".

Yes, I had one say that to me about *15* years ago.

That we could not do today, what they managed to do with only the technology they had available in the 1960s.

This is why we need to get space exploration OUT of the hands of NASA.

Remember that.