[retrac]

I guess it's a matter of perspective. By the standards of the decade before that, a computer which could run for 2 - 3 days reliably without hardware glitches would have been remarkably reliable. For such a machine to sell for under $100,000 would have been stunning.

The reliability we think of with modern computers is, I think, mostly a consequence of very high integration. Few solder joints to go wrong.

The PDP-6 predates the integrated circuits of the PDP-11 models, and had a board as part of the ALU path that almost always blew at least one of the 36 boards (one for each bit in the machine word) on a power cycle.