Storage Cost Calculation

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> MRAB wrote:
>
>> In 1981 the BBC Micro was released. There were 2 versions, model A with
>> 16K and model B was 32K. The price difference was £100, so that's £100
>> for 16K of RAM.
>
> That doesn't follow. The model A might have been £1 (in which case you could
> get 16K for £1) or it might have been £10000. All your calculation shows is
> that model B was £100 more expensive.
>
> There are three more-or-less equally valid statistics you could have used to
> calculate the price of RAM: the average, minimum, or maximum. With only two
> data points, it doesn't matter whether you use the mean or median to
> calculate the average. Of the three, the minimum is probably the most
> useful.

The RAM was presumably the only difference between the two models, so
as long as Model A cost at least £100 (which seems likely; a bit of
quick Googling suggests that it may have been of the order of £400), a
£100 difference can plausibly be called the price of the RAM.

ChrisA