BAD HARDWARE WEEK

In a convention hall 40 years ago today, a computer scientist took to the stage and blew the crowd away with a couple of screens and the world’s first computer mouse (above).

Great and expensive vision when only the first calculators (below) appeared as a product at HP, when first microprocessor had not been still invented.
Calculator RAM called magnetic core memory had capacity of 4416 bits. The feritte memory has an advantage - the calculator can be switched off and on without losing data or programs. The lowest IC integration geometry in 1968. was around 50 microns. Today is only 45 nm, that means 1M times more in IC packaging density. Wafers were in area 225 time smaller, too. Together, today there is 225M times more transistors in a single processed wafer. Stunning, that is why calculator is priced $4,99 only. Seems that product prices go down as a square root of packaging density, or even slower.

Product Number: 9100

Introduced: 1968

Price: $4900