Posted on 01/22/2024 8:53:22 PM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
Back in 1978 I (i.e., the narrator Mr. Darling) worked for Cray Research, which made what was at the time the world’s fastest computer, the Cray-1. I thought it would be interesting to compare the Cray-1 with the latest model of iPhone, the iPhone 13. (this is a 2022 video)
| Item | Unis | Cray 1 | iPhone 13 | Factor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weight | Ounces | 176,000 | 6 | 29,300 |
| Price (2022 $) | 2022 | 38,000,000 | 1,000 | 38,000 |
| Speed | MFLOPS | 160 | 15,800,000 | 100,000 |
| Memory | MB | 160 | 512,000 | 60,000 |
| Power consumption | kW | 115 | LiOn 20 hours | |
| Cooling | Freon refr | Air |
My undergrad student computing at GA Tech was on a Cyber mainframe. FORTRAN on punch cards for the intro to computing class, later a PASCAL elective on time shared terminals.
Tech had an IBM PC student discount plan when I was a senior (IBM had a huge footprint in Atlanta then), and I bought one. Financed it like a car, which you could have bought a decent used car for what I spent.
So my grad school computing was on an early IBM-PC, used it a lot. I remember using interpreted BASIC to do some hairy numerical method solutions to nasty diff-eqs. The stuff would take hours to converge to a solution, but who cared? I’d get it set up and let it run overnight, have a solution when I woke up. It beat the heck out of having to drive down to the computer center to work on the Cyber, which could do it fast, but not conveniently!
Yep, sounds familiar. There was a strategy to it, but I’ve forgotten what it was. It wasn’t so bad for me because I got all of my 100 level required courses out of the way at community college first. But I seem to recall some horse-trading with others in My major.
CC
My math teachers wouldn’t allow us to use “slip-sticks”. Being slightly dyslexic that murdered my grades.
IPhone: imported from China
I also remember using a slide rule
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I remember building my first computer with blinking lights;
I remember the computer up the road at the Institute that took a whole building;
I remember cranking a phone to get an operator.
The bigger part of mainframes and supercomputers is their I/O capability.
You have my respect. The Cray teams were nothing short of spectacular. I was on Kwaj when we bought a Cray YMP 4.
I just read through the comments on this thread. They reminded me of a very old story:
Back in the late 70’s, AT&T would send a punch card with their bill which was to be returned with your check.
Some guy who also worked in IT would bring his card into the office and punch “/*” in the first two positions.
The “/*” in the first two character positions was the IBM JCL (Job Control Language) designation for EOJ (End Of Job).
The modified card would be placed in a batch with all the other return payments.
When the job read the “/*” it would terminate.
We don’t care anymore. The company is not willing to pay for it. We still have non-IT managers picking project implementation dates by randomly choosing a date. We also have budget constraints now. There was a time I would go through programs to make them run better but I was told to stop because no one was requesting it.
Luckily for me, I retired.
Ironically, I know a lot of people in Blacksburg Va who got their Masters from Ga Tech online. It’s a really good program.
Love the picture of the guy leaning on the disk drive.
Back in the Pentagon, we had one peculiar problem happening in the WWMCCS (Honeywell) mainframe. Around 03-0400 or so every night, several of the disk drives would start reporting errors. These disk drives were all adjacent to each other.
As the appointed system manager, I was asked to figure out what was going wrong. Eventually it came down to me staying overnight to see if I could catch the issue.
I did! It seems as soon as the nightly backups were completed, one of the operators would go in the back to take a nap.
Yup, this guy climbed up on the disk drives to sleep because they were warm!
Analysis complete, I issued a warning to not sleep on the equipment, especially the equipment with moving parts.
🤣
Thanks, SunkenCiv!
I used to teach the operating system for the Cray machines when I worked for Cray back in the late 70s.
Hey, for fixing a computer problem, that was a relatively easy diagnosis and solution!
I too remember the college punch cards and fortran. I also remember the guy selling the computer with two floppies saying it’s more than enough memory. And my first color laptop with 100meg hard drive.
Thanks. Interesting...
[[I started my first computing when I was a 1969 ME freshman]]
I was lucky, I didn’t get hooked on computers until my mid 30’s- then it all went downhill from there lol- I need rehab I think.
Loved my Amiga. Had a 500 and a 3000. Should never have sold them, they fetch a pretty penny on Ebay these days.
It's not just coding.
Compiler design has gotten lax as well. Fix the compilers and I think the coding will follow.
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