Typical UNIVAC^® 1108 Prices: 1968

The following are representative prices for UNIVAC 1108 components as of 1968 (in 1968 dollars). These are “Basic” prices, quoted to customers who perform all their own maintenance and support. These are regular commercial prices; educational institutions typically received a 25% discount on purchase price.

These components make up the central computer and mass storage. An typical 1108 configuration would have, in addition, a tape controller and one or more UNISERVO™ reel-to-reel magnetic tape drives, a card reader and punch, and a high speed line printer. Many sites used the UNIVAC 1004 plugboard-programmable tabulator as a card reader/punch and printer. Access from remote terminals, either batch (remote job entry) or demand (interactive timesharing) was possible with communications interfaces such as the batch-only Character Terminal Synchronous (CTS) and Word Terminal Synchronous (WTS), and the Communication Terminal Module Controller (CTMC), which supported both synchronous (batch) and asynchronous (demand) Communication Terminal Modules (CTM). Unfortunately, I do not have representative prices for these peripherals.

Notes

1. The depreciation of the U.S. dollar since 1968 makes a benchmark of the value of the dollar in those days useful. In 1968, a sporty domestic automobile, the Chevrolet Malibu Sport Coupe with a 307-cid V-8 engine cost US$2663, 696 times less than a megabyte of UNIVAC core memory.
2. UNIVAC has been, over the years, a registered trademark of Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, Remington Rand Corporation, Sperry Rand Corporation, Sperry Corporation, and Unisys Corporation. FASTRAND and UNISERVO are trademarks of Sperry Rand Corporation, since merged into Unisys Corporation.

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