I don't know what's more astounding, the price per MB or the fact that the NZ$ was once worth 1.25 US$.

Yeah, I know - you can blame the Muldoon government for that. Mind you access to foreign exchange was limited for ordinary folk back then so you couldn't have benefited from it anyway

What was it used for?

The 6700 was a university mainframe, the only one at the Uni, everything ran on it, from payroll to research. That memory purchase doubled the size of the machine's memory. Memory cycle time was 1uS ... That's read time, core reads are destructive, and you have to write the data you read back, writes were faster ... Read-modify-write cycle could be done in the same time as a read