Goodbye to my beloved 1978 clock radio

Today after 45 YEARS of essentially continuous operation, my 1978 Panasonic clock radio, model RC-200, serial #6J0566B, started making buzzing, humming, and static noises. No amount of knob fiddling or even shaking could silence it. Even turning the big silver mechanical switch (real points and contacts, not a logic controller) to on/off/alarm/radio has no effect. Something clearly "popped" in the very analog circuitry and there is no longer any "off."

It's time to say goodbye. Here it is one last time, sitting on top of my new MacBookPro M2 Max w/12CPUs, 38GPUs, and 64GB of fast (400 GB/s) RAM. Notice how brilliant the blue-green vacuum fluorescent display remains! The dimmer knob works too but the potentiometer clearly has decades of oxidation and dust and the dimming is no longer linear and smooth.

• In the year of manufacture of this clock radio (1978), the cost of RAM dropped from almost $30,000/MB to $16,000/MB (see the superb info at https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm) and kept dropping by nearly 2X year over year after that. So using $22,000/MB as an average, the RAM in my laptop would have cost an astonishing $1.4 billion dollars -- or $6.28 billion in 2022 dollars
• Assume approx. 500,000 computers in the world in 1978. DEC had sold 170,000 PDP units in the 1970s and there were 1000s IBM System/360, Sperry Univac, CDC, and similar mainframe installations. Remember, 1978 is the cusp of the personal computer revolution; the Apple II and TRS-80 had only just come out, the popular Commodore VIC-20 would not arrive until 1980, and the super popular Commodore 64 (12-17 million units sold) and IBM PC not until 4 years later, with the PC selling 750,000 units in 1983 alone. By 1978, early hobbyist machines like the Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080 had only sold in the 10000s units in total. Assume also that machines had on average 32K RAM. Advanced machines like 32-bit superminis that emerged around 1977 (e.g. the DEC VAX 11/780) might have had significantly more RAM but there certainly were not millions of those machines in existence, and smaller hobbyist machines often had only 4K RAM.
• 500,000 computers X 32K RAM = 16GB. My laptop has four times the memory of the total installed base of computing in 1978. This would certainly not be the case just 4 years later.
• The 12 cores running at 3.5Ghz are rated at 13.6 teraflops (Trillions of Floating Point OPerations) of performance. In 1978, the fastest machine available was the Cray-1 at 160 megaflops, or 0.00016 teraflops, making the laptop nearly 85,000 times faster. It would not be until 2001, 23 years later, that the IBM ASCI White machine would exceed 10 teraflops. In 2022, the Frontier supercomputer, an HPE Cray EX235a at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, produced ~1100 petaflops, or 1,100,000 teraflops. This is 1,100,000,000,000,000,000 64-bit math operations (like 719072987873.5576 + 432798873246753.320023) per second.
• By 1993 and the birth of the World Wide Web, RAM cost around $30/MB -- but this would still cost $1.92 million dollars.
• In 2007, the year the iPhone 1 was introduced, RAM cost around $0.04/MB -- but this would still cost $2560 dollars.
• RAM today (Nov 2022) costs $0.0021/MB -- just $134 dollars.

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