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Ask Slashdot: How Powerful is Your Computer?
Kurt submitted this interesting question:
"All of us have, at one time or another,
played the 'I remember when' game. For me
it was 'I remember when the first accoustic
coupler modems came out for the Apple II'.
My dad remembers when programming
meant soldering wires. I found myself recently
sitting in front of my K6-233 wondering
things like: 'At what time was the entire
world's computing power equal to my 233?'
and 'How soon will I be able to buy a machine
more powerful than the world's computing power
when I was born?' What I would like to see is
a graph of the entire worlds (desktop-mainframe)
computing power (machines times MIPS
[or other power rating]) - preferably with some
"giants of the day" plotted as a reference.
Does anyone know of such a thing? I'm just looking
for ballpark numbers, here."
I think the best you'll get is very rough estimates, if that. Not all 'computer power' is created equal, and MIPS isn't a very good indicator of power.
Some of the world's most powerful computers are secret so your numbers are guaranteed to be wrong.
Last year my uncle recently got the latest and greatest thinkpad. So I inherited a Poqet Palmtop. I took it to school every day and wrote papers with it on WP 5.1 and programed on with NASM and BASIC (would have done C, but it only has a 1MB SRAM card). Evwenthough this 8Mhz 8088 was slow, it gave me much of the functionality available today!
jas
There's a pretty good chart in Ray Kurzweil's new book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. It even includes mechanical, relay-based, and vacuum tube computers, showing that Moore's law is relevant regardless of the physical implementation of computing.
Decent book, but in retrospect, I wish that I could buy just the first half of the book and pay half the price.
Ken
Even if MIPS is an accurate measure of one machine (which is debatable) machines x MIPS is not an accurate measure of multiple machines.
You can't actually put all that power to use on one problem if the problem isn't parallelizable. (you can't get a baby in one month from 9 women)
I think this question may be impossible to answer except as the virtually useless "operations/second".
Now that we have Microsoft making software, it doesn't matter what the old computers did. Did they have Windows? No. Did they have Word? No. All I ever seem to read about here is how Microsoft is evil and linux is good and how everyone should buy AMD chips. Microsoft is responsible for you being able to use a computer today.
Microsoft apparently wrote the Basic in my C-64, but that's it for me. I'm perfectly able to use my comp without Microsoft. Had Microsoft not existed, we would still have Unix. There might have been a non-unix popular desktop OS, but it would probably have sucked a lot less. (Damn at work I have win95 crash at me 4 times a day on average.)
the NSA has a huge underground complex filled with dedicated number crunchers.
what the poster meant was 'how are you going to get statistics on them?'
http://www.best.com/~bmason/PoqetPC/
jas
Based on the recent book "In the age of Spiritual Machine" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670882178 He believes that 1 brain power computers for $1000 will be available in 2020 and over 1billion brain power computers for $1000 in 2099. I highly reccomend it as a well informed futurist book.
If you just want to be rough, find a chart of market growth for the computer indestry. Use this to figure out how many computers where out there each year. Then figure speed doubles every 18 months (os something like that, correct me if I'm wrong). Do some math and get back to us with the answer.
Yeah, and don't forget that if you just think they are not after you, it doesn't mean that they aren't!!!
Moreover, just that you think these computers are not secret doesn't mean that there are no secret computers so fast they can actually know the outcome of a certain algorithm BEFORE they have even seen it!
Please don't let this boil down to a debate of M$ vs. Linux/FreeBSD/BeOS/whatever. We already had *two* "first post" messages.
Every operating system has its advantages, and we need to learn to be objective and try to select tools appropriate to the task at hand and our ability to use such tools. Windows 95/98/2000/3.x is for the end-user. Linux is, among other things, a good platform for development and networking. Same for FreeBSD. BeOS is good for multimedia.
I don't use Windows as a development platform. I don't play with Linux for multimedia. And I don't turn my computer-illiterate mother loose on a BeOS system. It's a matter of what I'm trying to do, not what I like the best.
Remeber when a VIC-20 was a "Familly Computer" and had "Amazing Color Graphics"? Man I love my vic20..
I'm told there's a webserver running on a vic20 somewhere. !
I first learned to code from a VIC-20 BASIC manual without ever having touched the computer(it was broken). Commodore had some *great* documentation people..
Make sure you're using LinuxPPC R5 Beta! It is much accelerated, compared to LinuxPPC R4. Also, make sure you do a custom compile of the kernel, as the default kernel is rather slow.
hehehehe, funny. Sorry, but my first choice for a computer was an Amiga, but comodore stepped on the scene, and I wont talk about that.
I strarted off with a 286. It has IBM Dos on that. then I went to a 486 and instructed it to be delivered with OS/2 on that. Now I have a PII and it has not known anything other than Linux. Yeah, Microsoft helped me a lot.
If you like High Speed CDROMS, Large Hard Drives, and Powerful Graphics Cards, you dont thank Microsoft. Think of the TWO larest sectors of software for home use. Video Games and Adult Material. Imagine, Virtual Valerie or Leasure suite Larry in CGA! Mr Bill had nothing to do with that!
Is computational power all that is lacking to "simulate" a human brain?
For instance, adding more ops/sec won't help solve Travelling Salesman. You have to think of a better algorithm.
The reason I put "simulate" in quotes is that isn't really the right word. A "simulated" song is still a song. The same is clearly (?) true of a thought, so why not a mind?
We have the ability to create machines running neural nets of the same or greater neuron-count as many lower-to-mid intelligence animals. We are probaly only a few years away from the ability to create machines capable of running human-or-better level nets.
:)
However, this does not mean that we can either acheive the "processing power" of the human brain nor simulate a human being. The structure and organization of the mind are still opaque mysteries and will likely remain so for much longer than our lifetimes.
Anyone want to link systems together to form a distributed neural net and see if we can "teach" it to recognize our favorite style of music? That'd make searching for MP3's so much easier
That does seem to be all I read around here. 1999 has not been a good year for
Microsoft is responsible for you being able to use a computer today.
BUHAHAHAHAHAHA. Nice troll!
Actually, the computing world would have been much more interesting if MS was never around. Think of all the OS innovation that could have occurred without an 800 pound gorilla squashing every competitor. Fortunately it's not too late.
Personally I've never had an MS operating system on one of my computers, and this is not going to change because MS is still producing crap after all these years.
Often times, a lab of 40 SPARCS will run an application slower than it running on a single node.
If you tie all the world's computers together, it won't even run at all, unless you have something embarassingly parallel like distributed.net's tasks.
-Bill K.
Sure. Where would I be without windows? Hmm... Well, I am writing this message on a NeXT Cube, and my home computer is a Power Mac G3. So, without microsoft I guess I would be right where I am right now today. Thanks for that food for thought on M$, and how it doesn't rule my life.
Clearly this post was from a moron who has only
ever used a M$ OS. "It's what I use so it must
be good". Give me a break. OK, so I've been using computers for 20 years, starting with RSX
on a PDP-11 and TOPS-20. I thought I found heaven
when I first used a NeXT. What a system that was!! At that time, stupid M$ was still farting
around with Win 3.1. What a joke. I had to use
X-Win at work (sorry, not a fan), but believe me,
M$ is NOT responsible for us "being able
to use a computer today", they stole every good
feature that is in Windows from somewhere else and
produced something more buggy, bloated and grotesque than has previously been seen in this industry, then used their market power to shove it down the public's throats. All they are responsible for is the sad shape of the computer industry today for reliability, user-friendliness and well-written efficient code.
...with classical computing. Consciousness is
almost certainly a quantum mechanical phenomenon.
Something like quantum cellular automata will be
needed to get the efficiency and complex behavior
of the neurons in the brain.
Before 1980 or so, there really weren't any personal computers. PARC had a workstation, but not really, and not very many. So look at a DEC VAX. It was one of the most popular minis of its day. Those things put out about 1 mips. I have no idea how many of these things existed, but they were mini-computers. There weren't many. but even in 1977 you count all the thousands of minis (DEC, IBM, Northern Telecom, Unisys, etc. ) plus all the mainframes, plus the early pc hobbyists, plus all the computers owned by the army, NASA, etc. That's a lot of computers. Even at .2 MIPS (or whatever measure you're using) tens of thousands of machines are still going to outpower your one.
Even Moore's law predicts only a 8000 factor of improvement since 1979.
That 8000 is most interesting in what it has allowed computers to do. We have more juice, but find more difficult things to do. However, the most impressive thing is that you can put, on your desk, a machine with more than enough power for most people, for well under a grand. (Not tens of millions of dollars) That is the real computer revolution.
And NeXT and Sun are responsible for you being able to post such silly statements to the Internet.
Never, Never, Never, Never, No-o-o Never Never Never,
We will not yield an inch of any field,
Fix us another toddy, ain't yieldin' to nobody,
Linus's standin' like Gibralter, he shall never falter,
Ask us what we say, it's to hell with Billy Gates,
Never shall our emblem go from wise ole' tux to damn windows.
look, computing is an algorithmic process; thinking is not! i dont care how many teraflops your box is running at it WILL NEVER THINK. the whole failed history of hard ai over last fifty years proves that it is impossible to distill thinking down to a rule-based system. neural nets might be able to simulate limited domains, but mind you they are SIMULATING. they aren't thinking. take a bio psych class and learn about the real wetware between your ears.
samedi@disinfo.HIMOM.net
Today there are very roughly a billion personal computers (a guess based on recent statistics suggesting that half of all households in the U.S. have PC's), each executing a billion meaningless instructions per second (this is an overestimate, but probably not by more than a factor of 10 or so). So this estimate probably is wrong only to a small constant factor on each count.
The number of computers in the world in a given speed category varies inversely with their speed. Thus there's very roughly just one computer somewhere running at ten trillion operations per second (let's say). The numbers in between vary as 1/n. Thus the total operations per second worldwide is largely dominated by PC's, not by supercomputers.
The semi-coincidence of numbers, along with the apparently exponential growth of numbers of computers since the 1800's (or even 1950's :-) suggests that a good answer is just to square Moore's Law.
Thus if Moore's Law claimed that this year we should expect a billion (10^9) operations per second from a single cpu, then worldwide we could expect (very roughly) (10^9)^2 = 10^18 (one quintillion) operations per second worldwide.
If you take more care with the above estimates, factor in known supercomputers, etc, then some numbers would go up, and others would go down, so it would probably still be roughly in the right ballpark.
doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)
I wonder how hard it would be for a computer
to simulate the brain of a "first" poster.
Check out the book Computer Organisation and Design.
Xerox created the Star which inspired the Lisa which was the failed precursor to the Macintosh which inspired MS-Windows. MIT wrote the X Window System; Xerox's work was an indirect inspiration, but X's development was inspired more by W and influenced by NeWS, DECWindows, and a slew of other wannabe standard Unix window systems.
--Sumner
A lot of you have been talking about web servers, which are cool. But a web server doesn't do too much. It spends most of its time fetching and serving files, expect when CGI or anything like that are used. A say a computer that is used as a graphic design lab is going to be pressed into doing work. Working with images is going to drain ram and cpu resources quicker than a server.
Does anyone here remember B-jacks and vax systems using them to network?
Well, actually, I think we can thank MS for the CPU race. If we'd been running a decent OS in the first place, we'd probably be running 386's (or hopefully 68020's) to write our letters to mum.
If there was somthing that knew the answer to everything and that something programmed everything into a computer. Then you'd be wrong.
U SUCK!
Intel does some things well...AMD does some things
well. Who gives sh*t who uses which processor? AMD, Cyrix, and to a lesser degree Centaur have stepped up and shown that there's room for more than one processor OEM. This is a GOOD THING(tm).
For those of you who don't belive so, look at Microshaft.
too lazy to log in
P.S. - when last I checked XEON's were up around the $1100 price point. My K6-2 350mhz cost me $118, roughly 10% of the XEON's cost. And only about 15-25% less computing power...
You do the math.
I'd like to see an ENIAC emulator.
compuveg@columbus.rr.com
AMD K6-2 chips are really good 3d gaming chips, and they currently have the fastest integer op speed for a non-server chip.
Cyrix 6x86-whatever chips are good for Windoze people who don't play games, and for Linux workstations.
PII's have the fastest FPU, so they are good for floating point math. Otherwise, both AMD & Cyrix beat them at integer ops, and AMD beats them at 3D graphics. Plus, they cost about 3x the other chips.
XEON's are just too expensive for the performance you get from them. They are only 10 - 15% faster than a like MHz PII, and that puts them just above a K6-2 in speed.
Each chip has its uses.
-- Too lazy to create an account.
The guiness book of world records from 1989
says the fastest computer is a Cray-2. With 32
Megabytes ram, and up to 250 million floating
point operations per second. They list a mid
range system as costing $17 million in october
1985.
I guess you could go out and buy a system like that for about 2000 dollars today. If top of the
line supercomputers are doing 1 tera-flops today,
then maybe in 10 years we will have teraflops machines on the desktop.
...and they have always made the wrong choiches.
:), did _everything_
Let's start:
1. Their first program was a BASIC interpreter.
BASIC is The Worst[tm] programming language
ever.
2. DOS, a unix lookalike
wrong. Even if it was to small to be named
an OS. It was a small library, a file
system, a command interpreter and a small
set of utilities. The library was slow and
bad. The file system was fucked up from the
start. The command interpreter was the
worst SH clone ever to be written, including
the shell the students have to write as a
part of our basic OS and hardware course.
The utilities was crippled, always did the
wrong thing and had the most restricted
versioning system ever.
3. Windows 3.1
Stole the GUI from Apple, was more bugsy
than an American kitchen, nothing new
except bad coding.
4. Windows NT
"New Technology", or in common language,
a bugfixed version of Windows 3.1.
5. Word
A ripoff of Word Perfect. Uses BASIC as
extension language, as they still haven't
found anything more brain damaged.
GUI-based word processing is anyway a bad
idea from the beginning.
6. VB
A bad implementation of the worst language,
but with a cool GUI designer. Don't remember
who they bought that from.
7. Access
A Bad[tm] implementation of a common concept
8. Excel
An implementation of The First Useful Program.
Haven't used it, but I assumes that it's as
bad designed as the rest.
9. IE
Port of Mosaic, well known to anyone who has
been on the net for more than 4 years.
10. Frontpage
Bad ripoff of a misuse of a markup language
which was bad designed and failed to do
what it was meant for doing. Netscape is
pretty much to blame for that.
I can't come up with more. Can you please give
me a product written by Microsoft which is
actually original or useful?
at least on my machine, P233MMX w/32MB RAM running Windows 95 OSR2.1. It was very stable until I tried Norton Utilities. The Crashguard actually caused crashes rather than prevent them. And SpeedStart caused some instability too.
I'm really getting fucking tired of hearing that
phrase whenever something cool or nifty rears it's
head. Just shut the hell up.
Actually, it IS a good deal faster than my old Win 3.1 box...but I won't get into that :)
Seriously, Win95 was a *massive* improvement over the previous MS OSes (Windows 3.1 was a sorry excuse for an OS, compared to 95 OSR2). Though you are correct that W95 is quite slow compared to, say, Linux. But the fact is that the ease-of-setup and ease-of-use on a Linux box, for non-technical people, has helped make Windows the dominant OS. Which means that's where the apps are, which means that I'm stuck with Windows to run most of my Windows apps (though I have high hopes for WINE's future improvements).
As for whether I run non-Quake apps on my Windows box, yes I do. Starcraft, Visio, Lotus SmartSuite, Sonique (a cool mp3 player), to name a few. And oh yeah, use my TV card that has no Linux drivers.
Though at least the damn GUI works without lots of time messing with a XFree86Config file (grr...X was a pain in the butt to get workin correctly)
Peace.
Featuring: The Performance Database Server. Start with the bottom of the Dhrystone results. Then find the older Whetstone database.
STREAM graph of Memory speed vs MFLOPS. (The STREAM standard results has speed numbers. The CPU Info Center has assorted historical CPU info. Here is Intel's Moore's Law graph. Here is a computer timeline. Here are the top 500 supercomputers since 1983.
"...more of a powerhouse." Doing what? Given enough RAM, you will both experience a severe lack of sluggishness on your desktop. What do you compare with? GIMP processing might be a good start...
Just wondering.
Now read a book that does more than list a bunch of premises with no conclusion. Anything by Hofstadter, but especially Godel, Escher, Bach.
I can't believe it's that easy to get you people to make a long thread over nothing. It's simple: just post a "Microsoft is good, other OSes are bad" and everyone responds.
Try not to give the original author the benefit of a smirk by replying to posts that goad.
1) Care to prove that the mind is not algorithmic?
2) You really need to read some Hofstadter. You don't understand what "simulation" means and doesn't mean.
I could have sworn I'd read in some article that
:)
the idea of the neural net theory of how the brain
works been proven inaccurate? (But the idea of
neural nets are supposedly still a useful tool,
according to it.)
I don't claim this as true, but I'd like to know
one way or another.
Of course they all know the answer already.
It's 42
Not really, we are doing much better, actually. Those numbers were peaks. They also looked like
they were per processor. Bang/buck you're k6 is
getting pretty close to a 90's Cray.
I remember looking through the C64 section at the K-mart in 1984 and finding a book called "The Complete C64 Reference". It had full pinouts. Full memory maps. Full hardware specs. Sprite registers. Byte orders for port hardware. Timing diagrams for CPU instructions. It even had a full C64 schematic in the back (folded like a map) with pin numbering. It cost me just $19.95. I remember thinking how good documentation had gotten (I'd grown up with crusty UNIX machines and awful documentation).
:-)
If only I'd know then that 1984 was the peak for personal computer documentation.
At least VICE continues to satisfy my one true love of computing hardware
True, but that is a very crufty intelligence-generation algorithm. Probability would likely catch you: the system would rot of old age before it got to one that raised it's hand!
...
Can a neural net use it's own state as input? I think that that's pretty much the only way to acheive intelligence.
Or are you really that young?(No offense, but this was only in 1990/92)
There was a whole class of palmtops based on instruction-set compatible 80xx devices in the
early '90s. HP95LX,HP100LX, Sharp PC-3000,PC-3010,etc.
Most did not actually use a true Intel chip but a
instruction-set compatible NEC V{20|30}
I'm surprised that somebody out there doesn't
remember these.
I've had my HP100LX for about 6 years now. I've thought on occasion about putting it out to
pasture, but it's still far too useful, even though a StrongARM would squash a V30 between it's armpits into a substitute for cream cheese any day of the week.
Digression: HP just makes the BEST calculators in the world out there. Others may have more functionality, but none, IMHO, are more built for the road and generally useful. I know some engineers that still use their 10-yr old HP48s on a daily basis.
Too bad this skill doesn't translate over to their computer division all that well...
I've got one of my HPLX, send me a message @
armadilo@dSaPfAtM.com if you want it. Remove the cap letters for the correct address(damn spambots are getting awfully clever these days....)
Insofar as Linux was designed for the x86 architecture, it probably runs more efficiently on that architecture than on others. For example, if I remember correctly, the Linux VM expects an x86-like MMU and has to emulate an x86-like layout if the hadware is different. This may not affect the PowerPC (depending on how similar its MMU is to the x86 one), but I'm sure there are plenty of issues like this, and some are bound to negatively impact non-x86 ports.
The ENIAC was made in the 1940's not 1960's and it was made up of 18,000 vacuum tubes. It operated in base 10 not in binary which is kinda cool. Also as for actual speed the first model ran at a clock rate of 60kHz and it took about 30 cycles to do a simple add. As for memory it had 20, 10 digit accumulators and then 100 words or magnetic core memory were later added.
As for a side note, the first super computer CDC 6000 designed by Seymour Cray in 1964 was able to achieve 3 million instructions/sec.
factoring prime numbers
So . . .
I bought a ham sandwich the other day.
I just need to find mustard for the bastard.
Yes. Yes, it is. HAHAHAHAH...;P
Right.. M$ brought us the original computers.. no wait that was the military during the war and the various universities..
M$ brought us networking then! or was it the Unix world.. wrong there too I guess
M$ surely brought us the Internet.. awps.. nope that was the university world with DARPA..
The www then? Nope.. that was CERN..
Graphical desktops? Nope.. anyone that was working at M$ during the Windows 286 years would remember the famous Gates' phrase: "Be more like the Mac"
Computing to the home? Nope.. Apple did that well without M$.. Schools usualy use Macs to teach children, even my high school had more Macs than PCs..
To the office?? Nope.. 5 years ago any secretary would have refused to work in an office that didn't use WordPerfect on some DOS version.
Geeeeeeeee.... M$ sure brought us computers!!
dont you guys see how obvious it is that this guy (96% chance he is a guy :} ) was just trying to rile everyone up and make them look like idiots? then you guys go ahead and give him what he wants. duh.
its best to just ignore flame baiters like this idiot.
First off, I have to agree... I love my HP100LX. It is insanely slow and underpowered these days compared to the Omnibook and my Palmpilot but it has its advantages in certain areas. I really think HP dropped the ball by moving to WinCE instead of just coming out with a 486 based HP200LX with perhaps a mono VGA or even color screen that runs DOS/Windows/Linux. WinCE is just a complete joke and I refuse to buy any products using it.
As for the HP48.. I love my HP48GX as well. I bought it 4 or 5 years ago and its been running like a champ ever since. Occasionally replace the batteries and you're good to go. Unfortunately this is another area HP is lacking in. The HP48 has got to be at LEAST a decade old and it shows badly. It is painfully slow at calculating anything non-trivial and the graphing support sucks. My old Casio used to be much faster than it though it didn't have nearly the features. a TI-92 is out of the question since I'd rather just lug around a laptop if I'm going to carry such a huge beast around! Are there any cool new calculators out there?
(note: i do agree, and *have* read Hofstadter etc)
The Problem with that is twofold:
1. We cannot simulate Atoms because we
still don't know their exact deterministic
behaviour. They are too "quantum"..?
2. To simulate a human, certainly you must
simulate their environment. How much of
it? All of it. You can't "neglect" some
part of the universe, because each part
influences, shapes, and defines the
behaviour of all other parts. (If you've
read Hofstatder's GEB, imagine the
universe as an ant colony.. for it to be
THAT ant colony, you need the whole
colony). The problem with simulating the
entire universe: each particle needs to
be represented in the machine. In other
words: builing the simulation machine's
memory would consume EVERY particle in the
universe.. leaving no space for either
the algorithm to be represented, or for
US to exist.
I know there are solutions to these problems. We just haven't found them yet.
And shortly, we could all therefore be upgrading to MacOS X/10... BSD 4.4 UNIX is fine by me!
Here is a quarterly survey of the top 500 most powerful systems in the world. FYI: Currently, the ASCI Red is at the top. Maybe we'll see Star Bridge Systems (SBS) up at number 1 soon.
OK, so they slap a half-assed kluge of an OS/2 WPS imitation GUI on top of thunked up version DOS and make it automatically start Windows and this is a "great leap"? Win95 was obsolete the day it was released. Win98 still is.
Please.
Your computer has about the same power as all the
mechanical totalizators that ran the world's
horserace tracks during the 1930's put together.
The world's total computing power passed the
modern desktop during WWII when the Colossus
codebreaking machine was built. Because it
used specialized hardware, like the tote boards,
it broke codes faster than today's Pentium
could break them.
General purpose computers in total passed the
Pentium in power around 1960, when Ross Perot
sold so many for IBM that a world germanium
shortage resulted. This was fixed by having
smart kids learn Basic instead of building
crystal sets, and by switching computers to
use silicon, which has since caused a serious
shortage of room at the beach.
We have issued an urgent buy recommendation on
Crap Consolidated Computers, a company that is
solving this problem by making computers entirely
from natural recycled materials, giving them
natural features and odors more compatible with
the available commercial software and OS's.
a "450a" WILL run long and stable. absofsckinglutely stable. months at a time without a reboot, mebbe longer.
Peecees don't have the throughput that big iron has.
:), corporate decreed NT everywhere, much to his digust.
Pops, a mainframe guy from waaayyy back explained it like this: A PC can move data really fast, but it moves information like an itty bitty garden hose running wide open. Mainframes move data more like a river. Not so fast maybe, but huge volumes of it.
For what its worth, at his company (unnamed but dwarfs mickeysoft, no guesses
But they don't already know what you're gonna ask--not without the new Improbability Overdrive chips.
Komfortably Numb
PS: I'm feelin like it's more like 420 anyway
CPU speed seams to have not that much affect on Windows. For some unknown reason it is completely IO bound. If a drop a disk into the CD player at work, the machine hichups. All that I did was shut the friggen door. If I turn off or disconect the printer I get a pop up saying printer error. Then Ill run either IE, Netscape, and/or winamp and the thing is constantly swapping. This is a P233 with 64 Meg of ram that is stuck in the swap running IE. Its only a little bit worse than the P100 with 80Meg of ram that was its predicessor. A faster CPU does not always make the system run quicker. Tis a shame that the general public believes that if you put a faster CPU in an IO bound system, that the over all performance will go up.
Well, hell yeah I remeber it. Do you remeber the Commodore Plus 4? that was cool tool, ah my first computer makes me fell all funny inside.
that's a much better question. the earliest computers may well have won WWII for the USA. is your desktop computer anywhere near as useful? heck, are all the computers in the world put together anywhere near as useful?
4 more Mhz and you could be equal to my 286, it ran dos with GeoWorks, what a great think it even has an AOL version 1 demo on it.
Actually, I should think that the building of most supercomputers is well known and documented. I suspect that it's just the buyers and purpose that is unknown. I know that was the case when I worked for a company that build hardware (ghost buyers would purchase the hardware (not that we built supercomputers))...
Kurt (original question asker)
1) your talk has nothing to do in this thread. The question was not about M$ so please don't do not bother us with it.
2) others answers are as stupid as your own message. People who flame back are dumber than people who flame first.
ooh ooh i know!
M$ gave us the amazing start menu! and in win98 it even slides in and out (which is horrid on slower machines).
I hate to say it, but Apple is responsible for my being able to use my computer today. I got an Apple PC when I was four and was fiddling with BASIC by six. Never, *never* have I seen MS create a decent educational program, and Windows does more to obfuscate the operation of the computer than any home OS ever created. It is a terrible learning tool, just as doing a child's homework for him or her is a terrible teaching method. MS is the reason that so many computer users don't understand what they are doing.
In fact, MS is responsible for allowing people to use software without having to operate a computer in any kind of aware manner. There are very good reasons that this is all you hear on this site. I'll try to point them out:
1. This site is a linux advocate
2. MS *is* evil, in the capitalist-pig sense.
3. For people who want to spend the time to make it work, linux is good.
4. Knowledge is power
5. With the advent of the K6-3 and K7, AMD just overtook Intel for most appealing mainstream x86 processor. Yes, everyone should buy AMD soon 'cause they are the best things coming up.
It strikes me that you have mistaken the software for the operation of the computer - kind of like mistaking the pointing finger for the moon, no? I hope this helps.
Don't be mistaken in thinking that a child is any less intelligent than an adult, or of equal intelligence to that of a chimp. A child of 2 will acquire new words every day, even though that word may only be presented to the child once. I still don't know if neural nets are capable of 'learning' without hundreds or even thousands of presentations.
And verabal ability is just one task that a 2 year old excels in...
The Lisa was apple's first GUI-based computer, not Xerox'.
ummm that's what the guy said. read it again.
i bet those weren't symmetric multiprocessing women..
Visicalc was a product of Visicorp, written by Dan Bricklin (who never patented - silly bugger)
True -- I run a K6-200, due to what was around
at the time for my particular budget (I couldn't
afford the £150 extra for a PII-233).
p.s. it has 64Mb of RAM, but I cannot reproduce
the SIG 11 bug, so I'm not sure I have that.
Anyhow...
I tried running Win NT -- crash city. And this
wasn't vanilla WinNT crash city either -- the OS
ran fine. Netscape (4.anything), IE (4.anything)
didn't run -- and Win NT got the boot in favour
of good old '95.
(p.s. The Linux on the other hard drive works
reasonable, though 2.2.1 has had the odd
'load explosion' problem, and 2.2pre7 had
an unexpected panic (load going from ~2-3
to well up in the hundreds in a second or two,
and then thats it (or at least the copnsole
response time is >1hour))
p.s. don't know '95 so much -- Win95 plus Office95
is the MOST stable office solution I know of --
just DONT take M$ at their word when they refer
to Windows as an 'Operating System' rather than
an 'Office95 Supplement'.
> you can't get a baby in one month from 9 women
No, but it'd sure be fun trying.
True -- if it weren't for M$, we would never have
had PC processors as powerful as we have.
Windows has basically been the mainstay of the
Wintel revenue stream, forcing upgrade after
upgrade onto the consumer.
There was a lot VAX'en out there, and before them thete ever popular PDP-series from DEC.
...and, surprisingly, it was finished late.
Correct.
3d monster maze was the classic ZX81 game (IMHO).
Yep... Seems the only real traffic on here in terms of comments comes via flaming M$/trolling
Starcraft rules. So does DirectX and 3D support in windows. Furthermore, the GUI in Win95 is very nice.
I use plenty of apps in both Windows and Linux and sometimes the Windows versions are better-- no joke. Mathematica on Windows is much, much sweeter than on Linux-- that motif interface sucks, the help system is cludgy and while it may not be faster than the Sparc version, it sure is easier to use, the interface is faster on Windows than the X-Windows, motif verstion. Exporting files as postscript is less ackward, etc....
Netscape doesn't crash nearly as often in Windows as it does in Linux-- neither does WordPerfect for that matter.
And, yuummmmmmm, there's StarCraft, which won't even begin to work in Wine anymore. Don't ask me why.
CoCo 1. 64K of memory. Taught myself how to program BASIC on that. Actually developed (sort of) a river raid clone on it. Pretty cool stuff. Had a cassette drive, and I might even have the cassettes still. I've got the CoCo down in the basement, and I think it even still works. :)
A product written by Microsoft??
Well, I did see an advertizement once that went something like this..
"Windows 95.. Brought to you by the creators of EDIT."
So I guess EDIT would be an "original" MS product?
(And probably the ONLY one?
At one of the IBM buildings in Poughkeepsie, NY, there is a sign that says something like "when you throw away a musical greeting card, you are throwing away more computing power than existed on the planet in 1948."
'At what time was the entire world's computing power equal to my 233?'
What is today's computing power?
Rough guess, 150,000,000 computers at approx 300 MHz
More rough guesses, both computer power and the number of computers have doubled every eighteen months, so world computer power has gone up 4 times every 18 months.
On this basis
'How soon
will I be able to buy a machine more powerful than the world's computing power when I was born?'
You were born in 1978, say 14 eighteen month periods ago, so world computer power then was around 200 million times less, which is about the power of a 250 Mhz PC. Sounds a bit wrong, so maybe things haven't gown that fast. If you are older than 21, maybe you have passed this point.
The future?
Well, I can't see the speed of computers rising forever, but lets say it goes up 2 times every eighteen months. We need a speed up of 150,000,000 in a single computer, and so, unless we hit a quantum effects/speed of light barrier,
A single computer will have equivalent processing power as all of todays computers after about 27 18 month periods, or 41 years.
I remember reading an article a few years ago where the author estimated that the unused CPU cycles on all the PCs during a given day/week/month/whatever exceeded all the CPU cycles on all the mainframes that had ever been built.
Pretty astonishing when you think about it. Not one of those things you can prove but when I compare the CPU power I have at home (which has on average only 2-3 users) to what we used to have on campus (multiple IBM 43xx systems with hundreds of users) it almost makes you feel ashamed that you're wasting so much useful compute power.
Add to the above A History of Parallel Computing with summaries back to 1950's. Too bad no benchmark numbers.
I am a BIG fan of HP Calculators. I had alot of them, but my favorite has to be the HP15C. Maybe because of sentimental value (I had it for well over 13 years), but I like the easy to read LCD display, the rugged design and the versitility this calculator had. I know I spent a lot of hours using it during Physics courses & EE. I'll even admit that I used it more than my more expensive HP calcs. BTW, does anybody remember the HP Calc that came out in to late 80's with a chiclet keyboard, a 2 to 4 line display and a video adapter?? -Bill
I mean, that *is* what this thread's about, right?
Anywhoo, years back, a buddy of mine who'd been a m/f systems programmer for a lotta years commented to me that a 25MH 386, though it didn't have the i/o bandwidth, was more powerful than an IBM 370/168, the std. m/f that most big companies ran on in the late 70's.
So, what do we *do* with all that excess power? Waste it drawing pseudo-3d pushbuttons....
mark "I hates meeces to pieces!"
Much as I think MS is abusing its monopoly power, I think anyone who goes and directs a personal attack on the man are themselves MORONS.
.)
/. establishment, spouting MS jargon. But come on! Give credit where credit is due.
No question about the facts of the original post: Bill and company did get a lot of the ideas about their most popular software from other sources. Heck, he even just did a direct port from one system to the other. But he himself is also a very smart man (in addition to being a shrewd business man).
Hey, were YOU accepted into Princeton? (or was it Harvard? hmm. .
I also seem to remember a story about him solving a math problem that only a handful of people in HISTORY have been able to solve. Without help.
I guess him having the vision to see what market to go into and which products to sell goes under him being a shrewd businessman. But as to his DOJ testimony? That alone should point to how smart and shrewd he is.
Notice any similarities between his testimony and that of Clinton? See any connections??
Now I am not a MS employee trying to "infiltrate" the
Not quite right
Windows is responsible for making my computer stop working when I want it to, and only allowing me to use it when I don't actually need it.
MS Word is the slowest, most pathetic piece of crap I have ever had the misfortune of using. Richard Stallman is responsible for me being able to use my computer today to get my work done, and Linus Torvalds is responsible for my computer actually doing something other than playing with a dancing paper clip.
Windoze 95 is still running on top of DOS. Safe to say we will go into the next millenium with a 1/2 16bit, 1/2 32bit OS (Windoze 1900). How many decades will it take for MS$ to come out with a 64bit OS? :)
It's true that you can't perfectly simulate anything, but the argument for why reminds me of probabilistic algorithms. "We can be 100% sure of achieving X in exponential time. We can be 99.99% sure of achieving X in linear time." Many such
algorithms exist, actually.
The point is that you _can_ build simulations that closely approximate the human brain. The exact modelling of hydrogen is not feasible, but maybe someone could recognize higher level elements (not "rules", but "neurons") and construct a better simulation. Saying that neural networks don't think because they're just a representation of neurons is like saying you don't think because your neurons are really just made up of unintelligent atoms. Hofstatder claims that the intelligence is in the system as a whole, and a crude representation still holds some intelligence, and still does some thinking.
Incidently, it is possible to simulate the entire universe without using the entire universe-- if the universe has a fractal structure.
-tedv
Sorry, but as a European I really have to take issue with that. If you were trolling for flames (although I suspect you weren't), congrats.
FYI it was mostly computers built in Britain under Turing's guidance that were used to crack the German codes and neutralise the U-Boot threat.
And as for "winning WW2 for the USA", you are definitely extracting the urine, my friend. USA was one nation (in fact, very much a latecomer) in an alliance. It was the Allies who won the war and they did it for many reasons, none of which was "for the USA".
So please re-examine your history after removing your stars-and-stripes-tinted spectacles.
Ta,
Chris
Well I have Crashguard running on an NT server 4.0 p200 w/64MB RAM. I use it as a fileserver on a 100Mbps net, a proxy server and as a workstation.
It has been up and running for two weeks, with Crashguard and Slowstart. I've run it longer, but when I go away for a weekend I shut it down. I can't remember having any crashes since I took out an ATI Rage 2+ video card and downgraded to a generic S3Virge.
If that isn't miraculous enough, I also have Office 2000 and IE 5.
About the only problem I have is that I should go out and buy a Pentium 2 with maybe 128MB of RAM. *!?# Windows is SLOOOOW.
Of course that is why I have that really really fast Linux machine with a P90 and 40MB RAM.
I'm annoyed that people so wrecklessly savage MS for not inventing _anything_. How many successful companies actually invented what they sell? Did GM invent the car? Did Toshiba invent the TV? Did Kenmore invent the oven? Did they even invent the bake timer? No, they probably stole the idea from some other inventor. Do we care? NO.
Computers you want? Fine. Did Netscape invent HTML? Did Yahoo! invent the search engine? Nope, in fact they stole the indexing thing from the library scientists. In fact, you would be hard pressed to think of a company that is more guilty of simply ripping off (i.e. buying) "technology" or "products", then marketing and bundling. Do I care? No. It is a great portal. They have tinkered with it and made it "better", or at least more convenient for me to use. It suits my needs, althought I know that I could go to hotmail for web-email, alta vista for searches, showing.com for movie times, cnn.com, for news.
Sure, some people think MS invented the computer. Many of those same people think that Lincoln was a Founding Father, that Stalin invented Communism, that Honda invented the motorcycle. Who cares?
Microsoft sells software that the public feels is good enough. Is the QWERTY keyboard the best? Is my Camry the best car? Is my Hitachi TV the best TV? Could I find someone somewhere who would sell me a better TV? Probably, but I bought Hitachi, Toyota, and qwerty because it was readily available and was good enough.
That's a much better question. the earliest computers may well have won WWII for the USA. is your desktop computer anywhere near as useful? heck, are all the computers in the world put together anywhere near as useful?
Yup, there was a documentary on TV a couple of weeks back about the codebreakers at bletchly park. They used graph paper (initially) and later colossus to break the Nazi enigma codes. Colossus was desined by a radio engineer (or something) who came up with the idea of using 18k valves to build a calculating machine, the machine was built and saved thousands of allied lives by decoding the messages sent by the U-Boats, shortening the war of the Atlantic by months or years.
PS. What do you mean "for the USA", WW2 was an allied attampt comprising Britain, Russia, Australia, France (but not for long) and resistance fighters in many of the occupoed countires, America only entered after Pearl Harbour (and also after making a healthy profit from lend/lease).
I'm annoyed that people so wrecklessly savage MS for not inventing _anything_. How many successful companies actually invented what they sell? Did GM invent the car? Did Toshiba invent the TV? Did Kenmore invent the oven? Did they even invent the bake timer? No, they probably stole the idea from some other inventor.
Do we care? NO.
Computers you want? Fine. Did Netscape invent HTML? Did Yahoo! invent the search engine? Nope, in fact they stole the indexing thing from the library scientists. In fact, you would be hard pressed to think of a company
that is more guilty of simply ripping off (i.e. buying) "technology" or "products", then marketing and bundling. Do I care? No. It is a great portal. They have tinkered with it and made it "better", or at least more convenient for me to use. It suits my needs, althought I know that I could go to hotmail for web-email, alta vista for searches,
showing.com for movie times, cnn.com, for news.
Sure, some people think MS invented the computer. Many of those same people think that Lincoln was a
Founding Father, that Stalin invented Communism, that Honda invented the motorcycle. Who cares?
Microsoft sells software that the public feels is good enough. Is the QWERTY keyboard the best? Is my Camry the best car? Is my Hitachi TV the best TV? Could I find someone somewhere who would sell me a better TV? Probably, but I bought Hitachi, Toyota, and qwerty because it was readily available and was good enough.
Well actually quantum computing if ever achieved will possibly do this. Read about superluminal motion. Lorentz transformations and new shit like this......
http://www.msnbc.com/news/242698.asp
For nearly all of my work, I use Linux-- in fact, windows is either incapable or inefficient for most things. However, I do know that Mathematica on Linux has a terrible, slow, motif interface. The windows version works much better. Cut and Paste, selection and saving, and the help system is all faster, smoother and supierior on windows. Try it for yourself, if you don't beleive me. Half the colleges in the world have Mathematica installed on Windows machines in computer labs. Now, it is easy to check, however, that the Linux version computes a bit faster. But for most things which only take a few seconds, the windows version is much more pleasant to use (except NO PAGER! in the window manager.)
As for netscape, it really is buggy on Linux It crashes. In windows, the operating system will crash and netscape won't. In Linux, the operating system stays up, but netscape crashes. So, I guess if you only use your computer to browse the web, it's take-it-or-leave-it Linux vs. Windows.
Anyway, this is really an on-topic discussion for "How powerful is your computer." But, I guess it's deserved since it's such a lame episode of "ask slashdot." What kind of answer did we want? Library, anyone?
Wow, I really feel ancient.
I have had this little baby for over 5 years and don't need anything else. No graphics, but if I really need the graphics, my PC handles it much better than some lame calc.
Yeah, great intuitive invention! I have to click on 'Start' to stop/shutdown. Just one example of MS making things easier for the non-technical (just like manually editing registry entries is such an improvement over INI files).
MS isn't a software company, they are a marketing firm. They take other people's ideas and market them (slapping their name on it of course).
"Before 1980 or so, there really weren't any personal computers." Huh? Were you around then? Try the IBM 1620 and 1130, which were personal computer workstations by any standards you can define. Gotta be desktop? Try the IBM 5100/5110/5120, which predate Apple and all them types quite nicely. (There WAS a reason the original IBM PC was the 5150, you know.)
BTW, if we are also on the "mine is older and slower than yours" kick, I started on a Univac I, serial number 4. Two hundred words of mercury-delay-line memory. Steel ribbon tape drives. Door on the side of the CPU for walk-in servicing. Can any of you kiddies beat that?
What a huge pile of lame answers.
Head over to alt.comp.folklore
where you'll probably get to talk to people who have a clue.
My own plates read as follows:
(frame) Get a life!
(plate) GETAMAC
(frame) Quell the Wintel hegemony!
some coward wrote..
>How USEFUL is your computer by Anonymous Coward
>on Friday February 19, @03:29 that's a much
>better question. the earliest computers may well
>have won WWII for the USA. is your desktop
>computer anywhere near as useful? heck, are all
>the computers in the world put together anywhere
>near as useful?
NO... the thing that won the war was that quite a few Germen scientists decided they would NOT use their "organic computers" for the wrong reasons and the wrong people even before there was a war.
If M$ never existed, one or more other companies would have promoted computers. The market was ready, and with Mac, NeXT, Amiga, and others already in place, they could have done just as well or better, if only collectively. M$ made the right marketing and business moves at the right time in order to gain the upper hand. A hand which was subsequently used to smash would-be competitors. Computers would have caught on without M$. Apple has had more to do with widespread computer use than M$. And if Apple hadn't existed, someone else would have brought us the GUI sooner or later. I even thought about how one could use a grpahical representation for things before I ever saw a Mac (or Star, etc.). I was 9 years old. BG is only a genius in terms of business and marketing. He certainly wasn't the only person to have these ideas and plans. That's all I have to say about that.
I remember having a bootleg copy of Aztec or Aztech C on my Apple II. It ran off of 4 diskettes, and while I think it took a diskette swap to compile and execute, was a pretty nice little intro to C.
Of course, I did so much more with my bootleg copies of Big Mac & Merlin assemblers. I actually bought Lisa but thought it sucked in comparison.
Um, computers today are quite useful. ASCI blue and red are used to simulate nuclear explosions, to do things like prevent the need to actually detonate these weapons. These machines also analyze the safety of dismantling old 50s and 60s nukes.
I've done this about 2 doz. times now, and so far, it's hitting 100% at guessing my guess. (Even when I *don't* whisper.)
I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but I donb't see what. this is a *good* trick and I (at least so far) don't get it. Maybe it's time for another cuppa joe...
AC, of course!! You don't think I'd use my real name on this post, do you?
and coincidentally, both M$'s Bill Gates and Apple's Steve ??? both visited PARC within months of each other.
But people are running around, both in this thread and others like it, saying that because MS "didn't invent a thing", they are not entitled to their success. To hold such an opinion is to be ignorant of how the vast majority of successful businesses operate.
I'm also a little surprised at how little most here value the Intellectual Property of putting together a successful operating system (even if they didn't invent from scratch any of the most significant components). Was it child's play?
As to "the most used pro-Microsoft argument", if Microsoft did make "the computer accessible to the rest of us", isn't that something that they should profit from? Most people in the world appreciate (with their dollars) companies that make technology available for them. If you and I don't, because we could have figured it out ourselves, does this mean MS isn't entitled to some of the goodwill it has generated from others?
Now I will quickly add that there are many other more substantial arguments to be made against MS. Creating a popular product that does not technically awe you, but does others, is not really their problem, but yours.
Doug Engelbart invented the mouse whilst he was employed at PARC. It first was used on the Alto, IIRC.
My money's on the Intel chip in this situation. I'm no expert, but as I understand it the PPC's are RISC based, and RISC chips generally need to run at a higher clockspeed to get the same results as a CISC chip. At the same clockspeed, the Intel chip should be faster than a G3. Of course, as always, YMMV depending on what metrics you use to benchmark it...
Bellsouth support is also kind of spotty -- the "A" key on mine sometimes works, sometimes doesn't and I've sent BS a couple of emails asking if they'll replace it. Nada responses.
The Blackberry looks interesting but it only works with Exchange. How about one that works with Linux?!
Say 'hi' to Thahn (sp?)!
The Amstrad was the best 8 bit machine! The basic alone supported real time events, complex sound and graphics. No print chr$(143) to clear the screen! No memory mapped IO! No rubber/membrane keys! And CP/M! Need I say more?
Enough about religion though, but I guess I speak for all here that I cannot believe that a pitiful excuse of computer that the IBM PC was made it to the world's most popular platform. CGA and a beeper on a PC vs CPC/C64/Amiga's capabilities? WTF! It just shows that mediocrity wins in the marketplace.
Greetings,
Michael.
stroucki@guild.net
muhahaha
very interesting idea... i wonder though how you count it..
lets say u count the manufacturing run of every chip company in the world that makes a chip
that could be considered a 'microprocessor'... do you want to count how many of those
were actually in use, or what?
and do you count desk calculators? slide rules?
might wanna more specifically define your criteria
for 'computer' here...
I added a 40MB flash card to an HP200LX, giving me the equivalent of a pretty nice PC-XT, circa 1983, but lighter, cheaper and portable. I run Borland Turbo C 2.0 (circa 1988, first PC software product I ever bought, legal copy! I've even still got the manuals) on it. There's a nice vi for the HP200, and an xlisp that works OK for small stuff too. No perl though, alas, the HP200 is just an 80186.
I bought the HP200 when I needed to replace my calculator (to take out in the field to do land surveying). By the time you add enough memory to an HP48 to make it usable for a land surveyor, you've spent more than the cost of an HP200.
When I went to the store to buy the calculator, those WinCE handhelds were pretty attractive as hardware, but I'll be damned if I'll buy a "computer" that I can't write a program for, so I went for old, low-powered, low-tech and fully programmable, and I'm really satiisfied with my HP200. Is it still impossible to write a program to run on a WinCE machine on the WinCE machine itself? WinCE, sheesh, what garbage.
I'd buy a more modern equivalent of an HP200 - same size, PC compatible more or less, 386 instruction set, serial port, PCMCIA and IR - so fast it would make your head spin. HP used to make cool things like the HP200LX, now they make printers that won't work at all unless you're running Win95/98. Too bad HP is more interested in keeping M$ happy than in keeping their customers happy.
I remain, Yours, Yet Another
Anonymous Coward
This is so cool. The concept that you're never wasting more than a few cycles on idle just seems so awesome. It never steals away from when you need it, and it even has some cool progress graphing too. It's even better when you (with permission) install it on all the computers at work and put in on 'invisible' mode. If you want to get technical it's cracking the code for a PRESET quote in a RC5-64 encoded contest message, and if you find the correct key then you get $1000 and x2 if you're not associated with a group. Anyway, they have lotsa ports, and a slashdot.org team (which is how I found this site) if you want to participate. (You don't have to be on a team if you don't want to, or you can join one of thousands of other teams)
--Adam
Ray Kurzweil's new book, Age of Spititual Machines, deals exactly with this. He plots the computing power of landmark computers going back to the 1940s, and shows using Moore's Law, that one $1000 computer will have the equivalent computing power of a mouse in 2010, a human brain in 2030, and ALL HUMAN BRAINS COMBINED in 2060!
You can quibble with his findings, but he discusses in depth the power of computers, supercomputers, brains, etc.
hehe, I like this. Took me a second to realize:).
Making such a graph for the very early years of computing should be relatively simple for those with the right data, since very few companies were actually producing computers. You'd have to get some records from IBM and a few others on how many computers (and of what types) they sold in what years, and that's it. No microcomputers to deal with, just the comparatively easy-to-count mainframes.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by Trvln:
Last year I was playing a game of Trival Pursuit.
I answered a question before It was read. I got the question right. The answer was 5.
It is possible to do this for any question. Just the odds are extremely small.
Its the 1000 monkeys at a 1000 typewriter type scenario.
So it is possible for a computer to answer a question before it is asked, and get it correct...everytime.
Posted by Imru al-Qays:
...
Kurzweil's newest, The Age of Spiritual Machines, includes comparison tables for things like the total computer power available in 1950 and at present, plus some wacky predictions
nobrainer
you had me at #!
If you like High Speed CDROMS, Large Hard Drives, and Powerful Graphics Cards, you dont thank Microsoft. Think of the TWO larest sectors of software for home use. Video Games and Adult Material. Imagine, Virtual Valerie or Leasure suite Larry in CGA! Mr Bill had nothing to do with that!
:) Hmm.... I wonder where those are.. :)
IIRC Leisure Suit Larry (#1) was a CGA or EGA game, I really don't recall anymore. I got a newer updated VGA version of it later, it's still IMHO the best thing Sierra ever produced (with Gabriel Knight and the Quest For Glory series following in a close second).
That's right. I remember running LSL 2 on a hercules monochrome card, off of floppy disk on an 8088 under PC-DOS 3.3 (it was an old machine at the time heh)
But first I need to fill my starflight addiction. That game is just too frickin big, been playing it off and on for nearly 10 years and never beat it, too much fun just crusing around in the ship exploring solar systems heh.
-Erik-
A CCII and your calling him a young pup!
Weanies one and all. My first true home computer(as opposed to the many development systems that my Dad brought home from work) was a TRS-80 Model I...not colour nothing... sheesh.
My first computer memory was of playing with a teletype when I was 3...which was only 22 years ago... so perhaps I'm a weanie too.
For the uninitiated a teletype was what we used before VDUs....(printer + keyboard + paper tape reader/writer) I only remember the fast 300 baud ones... 75baud and lower was before my time...
Well, I set up Linux RH 5.1 on a Celeron 350 + 256MB RAM and it's VERY nice. It hardly breaks a sweat serving on-the-fly generated webpages from Oracle 8 database.
you can find it here, if you are interested
Jón
I took a Compu Sci class called "The history of computing" a few years back. One of the textbooks was "Computer" by Martin Campell-Kelly and WIlliam Aspry. It's not to heavy into benchmarking or graphing performance, but it is a good read, and a nice historical reference on the prehistory and "early" history of computers.
Woopse that was dumb! corrected link below :(
Here is a link to that book on Amazon Computer: A History of the Information Machine.
It doesn't spend much time past the "PC Revolution," read, no windows 95 or Linux.
Woopse that was dumb! corrected link below :(
Here is a link to that book on Amazon Computer: A History of the Information Machine.
It doesn't spend much time past the "PC Revolution," read, no windows 95 or Linux.
you'd *never* have had cheap desktop kit without microsoft driving the market for machines to run its products. it would be terminals and mainframes only. in a very real way, bill gates is the father of linux.
the brain is just biology, which is just an abstraction layer on top of chemistry, which is similarly abstracted above physics. nothing non-computable there.
When I came to the this company I was a die-hard Linux geek. Now I see that FreeBSD makes a better production server. I still use SuSE for my desktop as it configs so easy. I don't know if you can get the above numbers with Linux. If you have, please let me know.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
What's the Travelling Salesman problem?
dylan_-
--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Wasn't that the same as a ZX81 over here (UK)? If so, there was a 16K RAM pack that you could slot in, though it tended to wobble a bit, so you should really tape it in. Then you could play games like Jet Set Willy, and I think Hungry Horace was a 16K game. Games used to say on the tape cover whether they were 16K or 48K (I have a ZX Spectrum 48K)....I remember when you could walk into John Menzies or Woolworths and see the shelves filled with games for Spectrum, Commodore64 and Amstrad.
If Slashdot had been around then, you would have had ACs posting "Commie64 sux" followed up with "Go play with your rubber keyed beer mat while we use a *real* computer"...the only thing everyone agreed on was that Amstrad was crap :-)
dylan_-
--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Oops....well, I never had a ZX81....I thought with the 16K pack it could run the same games the Speccy could....well, you live and learn
dylan_-
--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
But the fact is that the ease-of-setup and ease-of-use on a Linux box, for non-technical people, has helped make Windows the dominant OS.
Umm, that suggests that Linux was actively competing with Windows for users. When Win3.1 came out I think Linux had what, a thousand users? Even until the last few years Linux wasn't even a blip on Microsoft's radar. Linux never lost the battle..it hasn't even started yet.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
A 486 running apache can saturate a T1. You only need bogomips if you're serving a lot of dynamic stuff. Like, if you're slashdot, for example.
:).
I wouldn't overclock a server, not even with one of those rock-solid 450a jobs. Overclocking is for gaming (and that's what I use my celeron for
You have been reading too much Penrose... :)
Frankly, I still don't know what consciousness has got to do with quantum mechanics. AFAIK there is no evidence for quantum effects being relevant to the performance in the human brain.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Well, I'm gonna try to not toot my own horn too much, but how about a palm-sized 386:
http://www.rim.net
Complete with wireless networking.
There was very little in Win95 that wasn't in the Amiga or some other OS at least 5 years before. Long filenames, 32-bit, preemptive multitasking, desktop-based file manager, auto-configuring hardware, ... All old news. The only innovations of Win95 were in the areas of marketing and licensing.
Yes, M$ made a big leap from CP/M, er, PC-DOS, er, MS-DOS to Win95, but when you're starting from that far in the hole, even someone else's 5-year-old technology is going to look good.
As least get your history right. That title goes not to MS, but to Xerox, who invented the concept of the GUI, and to Apple, who perfected the concept of the GUI. Not to M$, who rather wrecked wrecked the concept of the GUI yet whom most other interfaces copy for some totally unknown reason (though most manage to undo a few of the mistakes).
Let's talk about the old computers, shall we? Did they have Windows? No. But better interfaces existed before than, most notably in MacOS. Did they have Word? No, but before Word came along other graphical word processors existed. I might add something here: the first version of Word in the form we know it today was written for the Mac.
Get your history right next time you shoot your mouth off.
The Lisa was apple's first GUI-based computer, not Xerox'.
:-)
Xerox did develop the GUI (along with Smalltalk, ethernet, the mouse and a number of other things) at their Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). It was a lot earlier than 1980, though. Actually, around 1974, I believe.
And it was called the Alto.
Although they did in 1981 release the Star, which was a commercial version of the Alto (which wasn't much more than a prototype), it never really sold much.
But you were heading in the right direction
- Sean
- SeanNi
- SeanNi
- #include "standard_disclaimer.h"
I've run several medium traffic (1000 or so hits/day) database driven dynamic sites of an old 486/25 with an overdrive to p63 and 24 megs of ram. Runs just fine.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
This is a table I got from a textbook
Computer Organization & Design,Hennessy & Patterson
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~mahrt/table.html
--- Linux... a college project gone horribly right
Not delivered yet, but I only paid $475 for it (Mobo and chip, both new).
I hope I can find memory for the bastard.
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
www.dcginc.com
It's only an SX, and they told me I got one of only 2 remaining. They have LX's and up as well, but for a little more money.
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
My two cents.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
A-men to that. I remember my first computer from 5 years ago:
an old TRS-80 Color Computer (model 1 if you could say) which was $5 from a yard sale.
The computer came with nothing but a BASIC manual and another "user's manual". It taught me everything I never
wanted to know about how the machine's ports work. Moreover, the BASIC manual was excellent.
In the back it even explained how to do lowlevel graphics programming (since that's
all you could do, well, not really since that computer had Extended Color BASIC instead of just Color BASIC, but anyway)
with the machine, plus a few small pointers on assembly language (although I never did get into ASM, and never have yet)
the real at&t mix
I really think we all have too much time on our hands.. and we also must remember.. its not the size of our process0r.. but what we do with it..
Victoria Palmer - I brake for unix.boys, Windows just breaks. - http://www.escape.com/~juliet
Oh DUH!@#! I forgot when an anon. person tells me to die im suppose to.. tsk tsk you Anonymous Coward
Victoria Palmer - I brake for unix.boys, Windows just breaks. - http://www.escape.com/~juliet
I've got to agree. The 89 is very nice. As a freshman engineering student this year, I thought about buying a 92. Then someone showed me a TI89. It does everything a TI92 does, and nearly all a 92Plus does. It's also smaller, and about $30 cheaper than a TI92. Very good calculator. Oh, it's running a 68000 chip.
My first crystal set actually used galena, not germanium. ;-)
One could literally teach oneself BASIC, Assembly and all kinds of programming tricks with those things.
If documentation of that quality were available for today's PC's, I would cry for joy.
Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from
Kythe
Um, no.
Apple, Power Computing, IBM and Motorola are largely responsible for the computer I use today. Microsoft is responsible for little more than ensuring that I have trouble finding software to run on it.
Microsoft hasn't done a damn thing for the computer industry, other than keep the hopelessly archaic X86 platform afloat. Yay?
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
"Windows 95.. Brought to you by the creators of EDIT."
actually, i think that the proper quote would be ``Windows 95, brought to you by the creators of edlin.''
ever had to use edlin for anything serious? not good for your health.
You're talking about the great leap in price, right?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
A computer will damn well know the answer before it gets the question. It just cannot respond before it is being asked. Just because I didn't ask my computer the result of 2+2 yet doesn't mean it doesn't know it.
I second that!
Management was ready to buy new servers this year for our offices (we have a Pentium Pro 180).
Trying to be the "contious employee" I told them they barely get any utilization as it is (primarily file/mail/print servers), if anything they should buy some more storage and maybe ram.
Federico
Actually, there have been 5 forms of falsehood:
1) Lies
2) Damned Lies
3) Statistics
4) Benchmarks
5) MicroSoft Product (schedule) Announcements
Add to this a 6th:
6) Presidential Testimony.
(As for the last- Some of the Democratic Senators wanted Pres. Clinton to testify in front of the Senate but it took over an hour for the Republican Senators to stop laughing and explain to them that they had no way to swear him in.)
-soup
(No man can learn about impotence the hard way.)
-soup (GNUrd, Speaker to Machines) "Laugh at yourself- Why should everyone else have all the fun?" -Romanchek's 6th Ru
Yeah. That great leap from DOS to Windows, to Windows 2.0, to Windows 3.0, to Windows 3.1, to Windows 3.11, to Windows for Workgroups 3.11, to Windows 95. That was a MAJOR hurdle :)
This is not to say that M$ is evil (though they may be) or that linux is good (though it is), but really -- after 10+ years of development, you'd kind of *expect* some leaps, wouldn't you?
My ballpark answer to your 1st question would be, around the mid-to-late 1950's. This guess-timate is based on several factors. Univac started delivering commercially available computer in the early 50's. IBM followed a few years later and sold mainframes in volume (100's per year) around the mid-50's. Around this time, the 1st all transitor computers were developed and started appearing by 1960.
Now these computers were extremely slow, but the shear number of them would would make up for this deficiency.
Another question would be, "When was the time when the fastest commercially available computer had the same processing power as a 233Mz Pentinum?" The answer to that one would be, around the late 60's (I think). BTW, the Cray I (which appeared around 1977???) had a "speed" of about 150 mega-flops.
Yeah, they seem pretty nice. It's just when you need to get real work done on a HP/UX (HP 9000) system, their own OS gets in the way. Let's take for example, a processor goes bad on a HP 9000. You have to power the whole system down and remove the processor. With a Sun box you just power the processor down and replace it, power the new processor up, and you're back in full business with no downtime.
What HP really excels at is printers, calculators and test equipment. Their servers are a pain to deal with at best beyond, "ohh, a problem, let's reboot."
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
When I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation a few years ago, the figure that I came up with was about 2020 for the computational power of a human brain in one computer (measured in operations/second vs neurons firing/second). Given differences in architecture, software problems, etc I would assume that a general purpose computer roughly capable of the same intellectual tasks as a human brain should be a reality by 2030 or so.
And then things get interesting.
AI so far has completely flopped. Well so what? What is the computational power and memory of a brain? Of a computer? Some problems are only addressable in hardware, and I honestly believe AI to be one of them. So when the AI folks finally have the necessary computational power, I think that AI will prove to be like chess-playing, like speech recognition, like lots of problems. Quite solvable with the right equipment.
But then we have a very nasty situation. For $70,000/year you can hire this human, or for $1000 you can buy a computer capable of the same job, but it works 24 hours a day. Do you want to hire or buy?
This dilemma has arisen in the past and the human almost always loses. However historically humans are more flexible and so there have always been plenty of other things that talking monkeys can easily do and machines can't yet. So with the machines handling the repetitive stuff, and the monkeys doing more interesting stuff, we all wind up generally better.
But what do the monkeys do when there is *nothing* that the machine can't do better? Sure at that point it is theoretically possible for us all to just be provided with the necessities of life - but does anything in the history of our economic system indicate that that will happen? Not that I can see!
I am not a techno-phobe, but I can tell you that I am preparing to have enough saved that I won't economically need to work after that point...
Ben Tilly
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
I think the microsoft's competitors get the real credit for advances in pc computing (assuming, of course, and without any evidence, yet) that another OS or platform wouldn't be on top if Billy G. hadn't bought QDOS to begin with.
Raise a glass to:
The various incarnations of (now) caldera's OpenDOS, OS/2, MacOS, AmigaOS, etc.
All the third party vendors driven under by Microsoft bundling.
Thank the folks who wrote Winsock.
Thank the original author of QDOS, too.
And, of course, CP/M
These are the people microsoft have copied, and the reason why MSDOS 1.0 isn't still the default OS installed on the PC's of the world.
Why not just find out how many of each processor was sold and add it out after you multiply the #of proceccors and the power of each. Of course the question is doomed ot be inacurate, but it's all in fun isn't it?
matguy
Net. Admin.
matguy(.com)
When I joined Digital in 1984 I was hired into the UNIX group at Merrimack, NH. On Day One, they gave me an email account: decvax!ccb. They also gave me a cube and a brand-new VT100. I took it out of the box and connected it to the serial cable in my office. At the other end of this cable was "Abyss" - a DEC VAX/11-780. A DEC VAX/11-780 had all of the computer power of perhaps a 386DX25. We probably had about 500mb of disk space and I think we had 4MB RAM. My terminal was one of 40 or so. We'd all be on there awking and grepping and running vi and using the compiler and all having a great time. Abyss was running a new operating system called "ULTRIX" - a newly commercialized version of 4.2c BSD UNIX.
Within a year we introduced the uVAX-II/GPX at roughly the same horsepower level and the world's first commercial release of the MIT X Window System. This was a machine that topped out at 9MB RAM and was designed for a single user...
In those days a UNIX kernel weighed in at about 300kb (we didn't compress kernels in those days) and you could actually install a fully functional UNIX system in under 27MB of disk space with plenty of room to spare.
My current computer (k6/2-300, 4.5GB, 128MB RAM) was pretty close to inconceivable as a home computer six years ago when I bought my first PC (486dx/33, 340MB, 8MB RAM).
All that being said, unless we start to go nutty with voice processing or mondo 3d, I think the current generation hardware is a mature plateau for the desktop platform.
Yeah,
It started shipping with the commodore 128, I think. It's too bad commodore got the commercial rights for Amiga in the states, much better design than today's computers...
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
whell all i can say is when are we going to have the computing power of some of the worlds fastest computers in a laptop. take a look at this on top500.org ,thier amazing. if thoes are the fastest computers, imagin how many pentiums and clones exist, and what if, just what if we installed pvmd on every computer in the world and each had a 1000BaseTX connection to each other and higher with the faster computers, what type of computing power would we have, only we can dream.
:). i also had a "i rember when" conversation with a friend that was telling me when he was in the army the he was in the first team to use digital equptment :), and i sit hear and play with old AND and NOR gates, and think of how they even made a processor out of them. just my 2cents.
whell thats a thought ive had a lot, once i understand how to program for pvm ill take all my computers and all my roomates computers and link them
-magister-
In what year will the world's computational power be enough to simulate a neural network of human brain complexity in real time?
Then... In what year will the power to simulate a human brain be contained in a single supercomputer?
Then... In what year will the power to simulate a human brain be contained in a computer the size of a human head?
I read a book by Tippler that was really good and he talked about it. I think his conclusion was about 2060 to get the simulated brain in a desktop computer. He's probably way off, because projecting the future is difficult, but it's still interesting to think about.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
You can't argue that computers will never be intelligent because they can't do Travelling Salesmen.
I don't know a single person who has the ability to do it either.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Did 100 MFLOPS in 1976 when it was introduced.
My Pentium 133 does 21 MFLOPS according to benchmarks.
All you people with 450 MHZ processors must be somewhere in the ballpark of a Cray I.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
CricketGraph rules! Saved me much frustration during many chemistry labs. and even a few physics ones...
My first computer (well, not mine really, but..)
was an SDS-920 (paper-tape reader , paper-tape punch), and then an SDS-930 which had a PRINTER
(ooops, I meant a printer, but it was loUD...)
The came PDP-11 and HP2107. And they actually
had some decent debuggers. Then I had a Compaq
386 with MS windows something or another on top
of DOS 3.31 (it was a Compaq remember?). I was
so visually shaken by the inferiority of the thing, I got rid of it after six months. Then came Windows 2.0 , at which time I finally decided to spring $5500 for a refurbished SparcStation 1, in
1991. 1992, we added a Sparcstation 1+, and 1993
we got a Mac 840AV. I have to admit that we have a Sony 300MHz Pentium II running Windows at this time, however, the computers that do the real work(read anything other than Quicken) are a Sparcstation 20, and an UltraSparc 2. I am typing this on a Toshiba Tecra740CDT, running Solaris x86 (being used as an X-terminal), with Netscape running on the Ultra, and going thru ipfilter as NAT on the Cable modem. If and When Quicken comes out on Solaris or Linux, will be day that I will say good-bye to ALL MS products. I wish that day was here today.
BTW, I did load Windows '98 on this machine ( the Toshiba that is ) last week , and I was so disgusted with it's egocentric behaviour, I took it out on Tuesday and loaded Solaris 7 x86 yesterday. Never again......
Sinan
So what? We're grateful that they built the PC market. Now they can get the hell out of the way for a really good OS.
At the time MS-DOS was the best. Its recent iterations are not the best, not even close. Their time over, and I think they've been more than compensated for their efforts.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
My god slashdot is full of knee jerk flamers. You people are all nuts! All you who started out their computing experiences with ENIAC and used to warm their buttocks with vaccum tubes and therefore just know that MS is satan spawn can't even comprehend a simple post. The above poster meant that MS is partially responsible for extending the popularity of computer to the masses and thus providing an economic incentive for the rapid increases in computing power that we all adore.
Even if he did mean that MS was responsible for creating the PC who gives a shit?
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
May I point you over to the newsgroup specifically for flaming?
You know, guys, I think the supposed-Microserfs we get here are really just spambots or something. Trying to build mailing lists.
On a side note, I'm beginning to seriously dislike the large number of Anonymous Coward posts. I wonder if there's a better way, that maintains privacy. Okay, that's enough rambling.
Conor
Programmer, Consultant, Geek, CTYer.
My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000.
This beast of a super computer had 1k of RAM, and you had to code all your programs yourself. It basicly was a basic interpreter. Hell, it had basic commands mapped out to the keys to make programming easier.
Soposedly, there was a RAM add-on, and programs it could read from cassette tapes(it had ear and mic jacks), but I never have seen either.
Someone once told me that a Cray was a multi-million dollar memory system with a CPU thrown in for free. The advantage of the Cray was that it could deal with very large datasets at high speed. It didn't have cache or virtual memory to slow things down.
d th.html for some memory bandwidth benchmarks that illustrate the huge difference between a PC and a "real computer".
Your typical PC or workstation runs like sludge when you are dealing with huge datasets that blow out the cache.
Take a look at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/standard/Bandwi
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
[Your question is off topic, but anyway.]
First of all, running a commercial web server on an overclocked system is probably the most stupid thing you could do.
The primary objective of a server - any server - is to run _long_ (for months without turning it off) and to run _stable_ (for months without needing to reboot).
Overclocked systems however are the exact opposite. People who use overclocked systems willingly sacrifice stability and reduce their CPU's lifetime to experience a bit more speed, usually for gaming.
But anyway, any old 486 running Linux can do fine as a web server - it depends on what kind of web server you need.
If your site only serves static web pages, even that old 486 can serve a small commercial site and probably won't have too much system load.
But modern web sites usually serve dynamic content. If not used wisely, CGI scripts, database queries, PHP pages, Java servlets and similar things need quite a bit of computing power and can hog a server.
Still, I haven't seen many commercial servers that couldn't be run by a machine with computing power similar to a Pentium/133. Of course, a totally different story is a web server that is extremely popular, such as online publications, search engines or slashdot. But how many commercial servers are that popular and have that many hits per minute, anyway?
Just like with anything else in computing, it's not just the CPU you put into your machine. E.g., the more RAM for your web server, the better.
Greetings,
Hanno
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
And it runs on AA batteries too!
There's more to it than this.
MS isn't evil, they are a necessity of modern computing, they give us a very good example of what NOT to do.
Things of "old" computers that did matter: The Apple ][ actually got me started in this industry, then I got my Amiga and it STILL multitasks better than my Windoze PC (and it hasn't even got a hard drive!).
As for Evil and Good, that's all opinion, I think that M$ makes a cruddy OS and Linux is a nice solution, personally though BeOS looks better and is MUCH easier to install! Game support is starting to creap into the alternate OS Scene... that means soon I can NUKE the space that now occupies the BSOD Generator and get on with some REAL gaming!
Zanthor
#ABSOLOUTE ROLLOCKS!
/home !
Are you *TRYING* to start a flame war?
Go $: cd
~Linux is not The Answer. Yes is the answer. Linux is The Question.
Mwaaahahahaha, I nearly sh*t my pants reading that. You make HORRIBLE jokes.
Neither MS, nor Apple, nor even Xerox invented the WIMP interface we know and love. Overlapping windows were thought up in the '40s, the mouse in the '50s, and WYSIWYG in the '60s, before PARC existed.
Since you know so much, you're going to tell me when these ideas really were first published, aren't you? Didn't think so.
In my original post to Slashdot, boldly titled I Got News for All of You, I made the following rash, unsubstantiated claim: Overlapping windows were thought up in the '40s, the mouse in the '50s, and WYSIWYG in the '60s, before PARC existed. A clever Anonymous Coward noted that I was a dumbass and provided no references to back up my statements. Some might argue that merely saying, "You didn't document your sources so what you say is shit!" fails to constitute stimulating intellecutal discourse. It's nothing more than small-minded heckling. Some might even suggest that you can provide a counter proposition of your own, and if you then "up the ante" and back your own position with documented sources, you've pretty effectively proven your point and made your opponent look like a hothead besides. I would like to thank my anonymous benefactor for not doing that to me, because I made several mistakes. Then again, within the context of the discussion, I believe the A.C. was implicitly defending the position that the whole WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers; a shorthand for describing the essential ingredients of a modern GUI) shebang was invented at Xerox PARC, which would be even more wrong than I was. My primary source of information is the book (please forgive me) Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything, by Steven Levy. Sure, it's about the Mac, but really, how can you have any kind of meaningful discussion of GUI based computing without mentioning the Mac? Yes, I was wrong. It was not multiple windows that were invented in the 1940s, it was information surfing. Vannevar Bush, in his July 1945 Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think describes the sort of ad-hoc, stream-of-consciousness, associative method that characterizes the way we access information on the Web. Bush envisioned a work station with multiple screens, not multiple windows. I was also wrong about the mouse being invented in the 1950s. Douglas Englebart didn't invent the mouse until the mid 1960s, when he was at SRI. Here's an interesting Smithsonian Institution interview with Douglas Englebart. Sometime after 1966, Alan Kay at the University of Utah (later to join PARC) designed a "personal" computer called Flex that featured high-resolution graphics, icons and multiple windows. However, Kay himself admits (in Insanely Great) its interface was "repellent to users." Kay went on to work on the Alto and Macintosh. In his own words, Jeff Raskin developed an idea for a graphical, multi-font WYSIWYG computer interface based on a bitmapped display in the mid-1960s, which is described in his 1967 Penn State thesis, A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System. I couldn't find a link to the thesis itself, but it is referenced in the database of the Software Patent Institute Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple. Xerox PARC was founded in the year 1970. According to Levy, the Alto prototype was built at the end of 1972. Here's a nice article about the Alto. Here is another interesting site with a number of links to articles on History of Computing So, in the end, I was wrong about multiple windows, wrong about the mouse, right about WSIWYG, and right about all of these existing before the creation of PARC. I apologize for not checking my facts before posting. Finally, to my "small-minded heckler", thank you.
In my original post to Slashdot, boldly titled I Got News for All of You, I made the following rash, unsubstantiated claim:
A clever Anonymous Coward noted that I was a dumbass and provided no references to back up my statements. Some might argue that merely saying, "You didn't document your sources so what you say is shit!" fails to constitute stimulating intellecutal discourse. It's nothing more than small-minded heckling.
Some might even suggest that you can provide a counter proposition of your own, and if you then "up the ante" and back your own position with documented sources, you've pretty effectively proven your point and made your opponent look like a hothead besides.
I would like to thank my anonymous benefactor for not doing that to me, because I made several mistakes. Then again, within the context of the discussion, I believe the A.C. was implicitly defending the position that the whole WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers; a shorthand for describing the essential ingredients of a modern GUI) shebang was invented at Xerox PARC, which would be even more wrong than I was.
My primary source of information is the book (please forgive me) Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything, by Steven Levy. Sure, it's about the Mac, but really, how can you have any kind of meaningful discussion of GUI based computing without mentioning the Mac?
Yes, I was wrong. It was not multiple windows that were invented in the 1940s, it was information surfing. Vannevar Bush, in his July 1945 Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think describes the sort of ad-hoc, stream-of-consciousness, associative method that characterizes the way we access information on the Web. Bush envisioned a work station with multiple screens, not multiple windows.
I was also wrong about the mouse being invented in the 1950s. Douglas Englebart didn't invent the mouse until the mid 1960s, when he was at SRI. Here's an interesting Smithsonian Institution interview with Douglas Englebart.
Sometime after 1966, Alan Kay at the University of Utah (later to join PARC) designed a "personal" computer called Flex that featured high-resolution graphics, icons and multiple windows. However, Kay himself admits (in Insanely Great) its interface was "repellent to users." Kay went on to work on the Alto and Macintosh.
In his own words, Jeff Raskin developed an idea for a graphical, multi-font WYSIWYG computer interface based on a bitmapped display in the mid-1960s, which is described in his 1967 Penn State thesis, A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System. I couldn't find a link to the thesis itself, but it is referenced in the database of the Software Patent Institute Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple.
Xerox PARC was founded in the year 1970. According to Levy, the Alto prototype was built at the end of 1972. Here's a nice A HREF="http://www.research.microsoft.com/users/blam pson/38-AltoSoftware/WebPage.html">artic le about the Alto.
Here is another interesting site with a number of links to articles on History of Computing
So, in the end, I was wrong about multiple windows, wrong about the mouse, right about WSIWYG, and right about all of these existing before the creation of PARC. I apologize for not checking my facts before posting.
Finally, to my "small-minded heckler", thank you.
Isaac Asimov wrote more than one story about a "MultiVac" type computer that controlled society. The idea was that if you modelled the social and psychological behavior of every person on earth, on the computer, the computer would predict events like murders up to a week before it actually happened. This would allow for the dispatchment of police to keep the to-be murderer in custody until well after the date of the crime he was to commmit.
On an interesting side note, the story I have in mind ended with the computer trying to kill itself. Knowing everything kind of sucks.
I have a C compiler that I can run on my HP 95LX, I think its called p(t)gcc (puny or tiny) and is somewhat free. Its not entirely ANSI C though =(
remember gbbs? ACOS/MACOS and METAL were very nice. remember METAL? i spent 4 years rewritting gbbs. then i got a mac lc. then a 7100/80 which is running mklinux right now. i still have a //e w/ a 9MHz prototype Zip Chip, a 10meg Xebec hd, and a 20meg corvus drive. i also have MAD other apple // stuff. i never did get a GS. wish i had. i used to had mad pse/ascii art skillz. did bbs ads, etc. wanna know something funny? untill a few years ago, the pool switch (i think that's what it did) at ABC news in DC was an apple ][+ running a custom program. i know this cuz my dad wrote that program and used to work there untill last year. it also had midnight commander pinball. i think that was the name of the pinball game. i still think that that was the best pinball games ever. someday (when i get a cable modem) i'll plug into my //e's ssc serial port and have a telnetable ACOS/MACOS gbbs-like bbs. after 4 years of coding, that damn bbs is gonna do something. back in the day, i didn't have a second line //e, so i couldn't run the bbs.
and only one
I have an old Casio Zoomer based on an 8088 compatible NEC processor (4Mhz! WHEW!) It is roughly the size of the original Apple Newton and hit the market in 1992-1993. It uses the GEOS "operating system" (PC flavor of the old GUI for the C=64). It actually runs on a version of DOS and is only and GEOS is only an operating system in the sense of windows 3.X or Win9X. For pics, check out www.grot.com
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
My question is how much power does a server need now? Let's say a web server... many of those Sun servers that are in IT room closets are far slower than anything I'd realistically use today, but they did pretty damn well.
What do you think? Celeron 300a overclocked to 450 running Linux as a web server?
- Hugh Buchanan
- Userfriendly.com
I use Linux at work, for FTP and DNS. I use NT for webserving (not my choice).
I put RH Linux on a partition of my harddrive at home (shared w/ win98) but I never really use it.
I love Linux at work. The box sits in the corner and never gives me any grief. No complaints, no problems. Just work work work all day long.
NT I have to re-boot and generally be more "hands-on"
But at home, I wanna do two things: Play games (quake II) and watch the porn I download from newsgroups. Linux doesn't support many games, and though it runs quakeII, not with GL support. (not w/ my card anyway) and Xanim doesn't support 1/2 the codecs that windows media player does. Also, I can't seem to get any ICQ programs to work. So I have to re-boot Win98 once or twice a day? I don't work on it, I PLAY on it.
Linux is a great OS. But it's gonna be AT LEAST a year, probably more, until it becomes a decent RECREATIONAL machine as well as the solid workhorse it already is.
And let's face it, Microsoft has brought computing to the masses. If it wasn't for the fact that hundreds of thousands of people bought their first computer this year, and over 1/2 of american homes now have one, how many of us would have jobs? I wouldn't. A website needs an audience.
My first computer was a TRS-80 model II. It had 4K of RAM and a regular cassette deck to load the programs in OFF A CASSETTE TAPE! we had to UPGRADE to 16K (K!!) to get a floppy drive. That was 1980.
MS-DOS courtesy of Bill Gates. BASIC language built in. If I hadn't burned programing concepts into my little 10-year old head back in 1980 with BASIC, would I be as good w/ computers today? As EMPLOYABLE?
Bill Gates was a geek in the basement once, too, ya know. Before he turned to the dark side...
:-)
-geekd
duh!
They're on a special "wither-up-and-blow-away" diet. :-)
Ask your doctor if getting up off your ass is right for you! -- Bill Maher
I run Linux with AMD, Via, Samsung, S3, and 3Dfx chips. There may be an Intel something lurking somewhere, but it's in the minority.
I was a bit of work trying to pull that off, but if you look around, you can find a decent setup (esp. for home use) that avoids both monopolies. If any CPU can be said to "go with Linux", it's an AMD, and my system runs very well. And cost me very little money.
It's very refreshing being able to choose what I want to run. At least we can thank MS and Intel for that.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
At work we've got a couple Sun Ultra 5's (233 Mhz w/ 256M RAM). Each of the Suns serve about 125k+ dynamic pages a day; running 8 copies of NS Enterprise, Informix, and Cold Fusion and they've still got room to grow. They're not as rock solid as I'd like (have to reboot about every 2 weeks) but alot better then our NT boxes(2-3 times a week).
We just gathered together some Linux boxes last week; P200s, and did some UNIX benchmarks on them and the suns. On overall system performance, the Suns only came out slightly better, but on fpu, they were about double the Linux. But what do you expect when you compare new high end systems to an old box. You buy a decent PII or AMD, and put 256M of RAM and a fast SCSI drive in it, you'll be hard pressed to find enough traffic to max it out.
Jeremy Phillips
Jeremy
"Opinions are like assholes; everyone's got one..."
Why are these questions of your "better"? I think the original question is quite interesting. It is difficult to answer accurately, but thoughtful attempts to answer it could be quite interesting.
Unfortunatley, no one seems inclined to even try to answer it. Rather than rising to the occasion, most of the posters to this topic are nitpicking.
So rather than nitpicking, I am going to try and start an attempt to answer the question. I don't have information readily available to me right now, so I will start by trying to better frame the question by defining some simplifying assumptions.
1. For the purpose of coming up with an aggregate value for the "total computing power" available in the world over a given time frame we should assume that the measurement for power scales linearly across a the number of systems we are measuring number of processors.
2. For the purpose of simplifying the "power" of any single system, we should assume that any two systems whose performance differs by no more than two fold have equivalent performance. This allows us to group microprocessor based systems of different architectures into similar performance categories based on processor generation. Unfortunatly, I don't know quite how to apply this to vector supercomputers and mainframe systems. Hopefully someone else can. This assumption introduces inaccuracy, but this inaacuracy only results in an error of less than two years or so.
Given that, for good or evil, M$ had a hand in spreading PCs and desktop computing to the level it is today, the real question is what is M$'s future value?
What can they do to advance/spread the future of computing? What will they do, for better or worse, that will influence how you use your computing power in the next 10 years? How long will M$ last? How will they need to restructure/change to adapt to the future? Keep in mind IBM and their corporate makeover(s), and what it took to change from a market leader to a market staple. It really isn't that difficult to imagine M$ getting pushed off the desktop in the near future; Apple's OSX/OS10 utilizes BSD and NeXTStep, both Intel compatible, and thus code wise a viable Windows replacement. Linux is making headway, and in the near future will become a viable desktop consumer OS. There also stands in the shadows BeOS, and even alternative chipsets/OSes as well, like Apple/PowerPC and Linux/Alpha, or Linux/PowerPC.
Any comments?
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Unfortunately, I don't have any useful numbers for people to play with/banter around. My response here is more about usefulness.
In the dark ages before PC enlightenment -- i.e., machines the masses could afford to own themselves -- the mainframes and minicomputers were handling 40-100 terminals, batch jobs, etc. I remember a professor of mine complaining how the cost of CPU time could be quantitively valued in DOLLARS per MICROSECOND.
A batch project run in 1980 using a high end 1977 IBM 370 (with all other users locked out) involving about 100 megabytes of data (cross referencing text, etc.) took about three days to run. Interestingly, the IS department who generally operated the machine expected the data run to take TWO WEEKS.
I can compile a 10M C++ code library from scatch on my K6/266 equipped machine including all of the added error checking required for code compilation, linking, etc. in about 15 minutes. I would suspect that other PC developers have larger projects which have been compiled even faster.
If all of the other mathematical elements were held constant, this would mean that my K6/266 would have taken about 2-1/2 hrs. to process the 1980 text run, about 40X faster than the high end 370.
Because I built it (last year), my total cost of components not counting the monitor, which I already owned) was about $580.
The system 370 cost about $3,000,000.
Funny thing. The K6 is idle about 75% of the time now and will be retired later this year; the 370 wasn't fully retired until around 1991.
My how things change...
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I don't remember the name of the program, but there was a C compiler for the Apple II series that didn't require more than 64k (possibly 48k) to run. 1MB is huge!
He said "ballpark numbers".. Basically, it would be a very very rough estimate, but you could then have another bragging right. :-)
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I literally learned to program on a C64 in '83. Everything I have learned since then I can trace back to my Commodore. It made it easy..
:-) I typed those in 'til my hands hurt. had some great stuff in those.. Remember Speedscript? Great word processor for the C64. Had a bunch of addons I used too, like the one to let you display 80 columns on the screen for a print-preview. Very cool.
:-)
The manual was all I needed to learn BASIC, and the reference manual (which I got from a friend and photocopied) taught me much everything I needed to learn assembler.
Plus, there were the magazines.. Oh man, I remember when I was first learning, someone gave me a c64 mag.. It had the basic program to let you type in the assembler programs it had inside. long line of hex numbers to type in, unless you got the version with the disk.. but hey, i was a poor kid.
Ahh, those were the days.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
we had a tandy 1000 pc in our house...still being used, until last year. now that is sad! and my grandmother still uses her apple II for accounting...she still believes it is the fastest thing on the market.....hey..really, we're not related!!!
I think in a way they do know the answer before the question is asked, with branch prediction and all that nice kinda stuff i don't really understand well enough to talk about.
I used to play Pong. I loved the original NES.
The Commodore 64 always had the best games. Thanks to this article, I feel really old, but I too wonder about the same stuff. As for kurt, there's a poster about the growth of the internet that may be of some use to you. I'll see if I can
track down the publishers and get you in touch with them.
If you're just serving out static Web pages, it doesn't matter what kind of machine you have, so long as it's reliable.
I took my PowerPC 601/75mhz (LinuxPPC) with 16M of Ram and hit it with a few million httpd requests. Note that this computer is worth about $50 on the open market. It could saturate more than five T1s and serve out many millions of pages per day.
The only place a Web Server would get bogged down is on CGIs and database accesses. To what extent it gets bogged down is entirely dependent on the CGI or database; the Web serving software is not a significant part of the equation.
CGIs don't tend to be _that_ big of a deal, though. Really the rough spots are around database access. That's the only place where real money should be spent.
Cartman
twerges@hotmail.com
AMD sucks... why wld u want to buy cheap chips that dont perform nearly as well as intel? On the server side the XEON will kick any k6 straight across the ass. As will the pentium pro 200.
i would never run my linux machines on an AMD chip.
yeah.. I have to agree with this... the only advantage to the pentium III thus far is the 3d enhancements... ooohhh... browse the web in 3d.... ahhhh.. play 3d like never before... hmmmm... ill just stick with my 2 K62-400's with TNT video cards... I think Ill be ok for a while....
Microsoft is responsible for you being able to use a computer today????? Wa Ha Ha Ha Ha Ho Ho He He. Yah right. People were using computers just fine before M$ came around. My first three computers had nothing to do with M$. And lets be honest here, if you are talking about a GUI. M$ did not even know what they were until a Mac prototype found its way to Redmond in late 1983, so that M$ could write software for it. Even today 15 years after the Mac was produced I still cannot enter all of the characters I want into file names on the NT machines we have here. And just because M$ publishes alot of the software out there does not mean that its good and we have to be satisfied with it. Most of it is bloated, with inefficient code, and is not the best way to go. NT 5 is apparently up around 30 million lines of code??? Lets say they only have a 5% bug rate on release. Thats around 1.5 million bugs folks. Oh excuse me issues. M$ programmers should have to learn how to program on the PalmOS before being able to program for Windows. The code there is small, tight, and efficient. There is no way we are getting another NT server for this lab. Perhaps a Qube, or if Apple can really make the UNIX like OSX work, I'll think about a Mac server.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Absolutely, this is why we would consider the Qube. This machine has Linux as the standard OS. For a server this would be a fine machine and it supports Windows and Appleshare networking as well. Right now we have NT running on a DEC alpha, and this is starting to show its age. So the system upgrade would either be a Mac running OSX or a Qube running Linux. The advantage of the Mac would be I could run other applications as well, such as Photoshop etc...
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
This is a list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. I don't know where you'd find a list of the progression over the years though.
i st.html
http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/top500/top500.l
It's hard to imagine how powerful computers are going to become...but it would be neat to compare my Pentium with ENIAC for instance. Obviously we're tying somewhere in the 1960's with PC vs. legacy supercomputers.
Cray 1, which was sold for $7M USD around 1977 had a peak performance of 133 megaflops, as Cray site (until recent integration with SGI site) claimed. Their 1985 machine (don't remember the name though) had 512MB of RAM and 16 giga flops top performance. Their 1993 machine overcame the tera flop limit. To compare, my AMD-K6 200MHz has reached peak performance of around 40 mega flops ... or maybe it was less - don't know if I understood the values right.
Excuse me? Least we forget that Paul Allen PORTED Basic from the mainframe to the Altair (and probably took this code verbatim and sold it to CBM). And DOS was QF86-DOS (or something like that) that Bill BOUGHT from someone else and hus gaggle of hacker friends developed. Windows has code which is LICENCED from Apple but one wonders why Bill worked on OS/2 before splitting all ties from IBM. Bill Gates is a shrewd buisness man and otherwise is an incompetitant MORON. Go read his responses in direct testimony at the USDOJ's site and see how dumb this moron is.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
my first computer memories are of when i was 4 years old and my dad sat me down in front of his TRS-80 Model 4....the rest is history....
"What do you think? Celeron 300a overclocked to 450 running Linux as a web server?"
---
I've got exactly that running and it works great. I don't get a huge amount of hits - around 18k/day but half of those are sql queries on a 250k entry table. That's the only hit I notice - and those are pretty brief. Other than that it doesn't phase it whatsoever. And stability hasn't been a problem either (I guess I'm another one of the lucky ones) - a month of uptime with rc5 and no extra cooling is standard.
you can start with a whole lot of mips on this top 500 of supercomputers site. www.top500.org
How would the #1 compare to an average PC ?
#1 Intel ASCI Red (9152 processors)
#2 SGI T3E1200 (1084 processors)
#3 SGI T3E900 (1324 processors)
and don't forget the those Beowulfen !
core dumped.
we doesnt make any sens if whe spend time thinking about the progress of the computer area, because its a waste of time, i spend several hours lisent to storys of the days that the most powerfull computer was a xt 286, we are movin fowar not backwards, we have to estimulate and improve tha advance of tecnologys, if we want to sea a future of prosperity.
Hmm. I started with my TI-994a (16k of RAM-woohoo!), played around with TRS-80's, Apple ]['s, and finally my Mac. While I keep Office on my Mac, I mostly use it to open old MS Works (windows) files and save them in a format Office 97 can handle. The other 99% of my time, I'm paid to work on Macs. Sweet deal. Gives me a lot of time to hang out here.
G
I drank what? -- Socrates
Damn!! I almost had to read that twice, just to make sure I was really seeing what you wrote! I hope you stand corrected of such ignorance, but in case you missed it, the only all original product to ever leave the hallowed halls of Redmond was Bob... and what a raging success that was. Took the market by storm, it did!
it's a good feeling to look back at what you once had and realize how impotent it is in today's standards. it gives you a good perspective of how irrevelant today's technology will be tomorrow.
We wouldn't be this far with the Xerox corp, after all, back in 1980 or so, they came up with the GUI on the Lisa or PARC or something like that.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?