Re: Do androids wet dream of electric sheep?
"But when did he actually write it?"
First published 1968 according to Wikipedia.
At that point a third generation (integrated circuit chips) mainframe computer with 1MB of ferrite main memory was state-of art and filled several tall cabinets. Even for the top of the range models the instruction times were at least 1 microsecond for simple op codes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Electric_System_4
Not sure about prices - my memory suggests a full system with peripherals cost about GBP2m - say about GBP20m today.