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 |
For sure, a Pickett in your pocket was all you needed
That must have been a real exciting time in your career! And a tough job to get, too. That’s awesome!
Now that’s a great observation.
At least the iPhone is designed and coded in the USA. At least most of it.
Because it HAD TO!
Because of cheap memory, code today is comparably inefficient and bloated.
Because it CAN BE!
Lol! Great story. Did you evict all the cats, too?
Our local hardware store has been in business over 40 years. When they first opened, they had a huge computer monitor for the point of sale system. They had the prettiest, most mellow store cat who slept on the monitor all the time. You could always pet him when you were checking out and he just lapped up all the customer attention.
Those warm monitors (and hard drives) are all long gone.
Imagine all the cat hair inside that monitor! I’m surprised it didn’t overheat and go BOOM!
Wow, must have been a great and fun position!
Ditto that. Still have my slide rule...
I remember how amazed I was at this machine when I got it in the 80's. I had John Elway's Quarterback on floppy disk. When I would press the button on the joystick to pass, I had to wait 3 or 4 seconds for the floppy drive to process to find out whether or not the pass was complete.
Some years ago Sony very cleverly eliminated that option to install / boot alternative OSes in an update, without mentioning they were going to. So Yellowdog Linux installations already in there just went poof, and no alt OS installations were possible. Sony went after the 3rd party methods to restore old and altered firmware.
My pleasure.
My second one was actually useful to me: In the game of Risk, which I played often with others in the back of our HS Math Lab, there are rules for attrition of armies depending on the values of the dice thrown and whether you're an attacker or defender. If I and my opponent each had huge armies facing each other in adjacent countries, and I knew eventually there'd be a battle between us, my question was: Is it better to wait for him to attack me, or better if I'm the attacker?
There was no web to search in 1970, and I hadn't yet learned the math tools (combinatorics) to solve it on paper, so I wrote a FORTRAN program to use random #s to simulate 1000 throws of the dice - attacker has 3 dice, defender has 2, all ties won by defender. (Results: attacker lost ~85 armies for each 100 lost by defender).
But I'd already used BASIC for a couple of years before that for more than just fun & games. I wrote programs to number-crunch statistics like chi-squared for Biology labs.
That reminds me of fifth or sixth grade before we had learned algebra and we had math word problems. You had to somehow intuitively solve them by inspection and brute-force trial and error. In your head and on paper without a computer.
I was a true nerd before the word was even being used.
those are new to me, FRiend. can you give me a quick synopsis?
i remember the IBM 360’s, DEC PDPs, and the CRAYs but never heard of the Metin h. was that a proprietary built computer and operating system? there were a lot of those. i remember working for NCR back in the day had they had their own. that was fun.
lol. ok.
In the 7th grade, we thought we were "cool with our slip-sticks"...
Then; Russ Dember walked in with this:
We had one those virtual reality rooms, that was a large 3D oval shape. After the thrill was over, it was decommissioned to a fancy meeting room dubbed the “egg”.
I bought a Mac //cx on credit for $6,000 (if I remember correctly…probably $2,000, but for some reason I’m thinking it was more) with a 40mb hard drive and maybe 2mb of RAM. Man, those were the days.
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