I would like to know the order of magnitude by which the ratio of a
programmer's salary has changed in comparison with the price of a
single processing step in between 1964 (the year the IBM/360 mainframe
was released) and today. To calculate this, you'd seem to need to
know:

1) The cost and operations per second of an IBM / 360 
2) The cost and operations per second of a "development machine" today
(let's just say a 2GHz machine and I'm willing to ignore word-length /
floating point issues)
3) The salary of a programmer in the mid 1960s
4) The salary of a programmer today (let's say $75K)
5) The inflation index between then and now

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Clarification of Question by larryobrien-ga on 19 Jun 2002 14:01 PDT

redspectra:

Yes, the "costs" I'm interested in are monetary. 

By "operations per second," I'm interested in average opcodes executed
per second. Since I'll be satisfied to be within an order of
magnitude, perhaps the distinction between clock speed and operations
per second is not important?

For the historical cost (of computers) data, check out Figure 2 in the
following document:
http://www.clev.frb.org/research/review99/third.pdf

The data in the above articles originates in the following economics
paper, but this paper costs $35 to download:
http://ideas.uqam.ca/ideas/data/Articles/redissuedv:1:y:1998:i:2:p:551-592.html

The best source for wage information should be available from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics:
http://www.bls.gov

Consumer Price Index (inflation) data is also available on the above
site:
http://www.bls.gov/cpi/home.htm

5) The inflation index between then and now

The cost and operations per second of an IBM / 360  

Just making sure:

By cost, you mean amount of money, and not the number of cycles needed
to execute an instruction, right? (cost has a different meaning in
Computer science than it does in it's daily usage)

And also, by operations per second, do you mean clock speed, or
average number of instructions a processer can process in a second.
(Clock speed is a much easier number to find)

Hmm.. I'm thinking this might help.  

http://www.met-office.gov.uk/research/nwp/numerical/computers/history.html