From: Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via COFF <coff@tuhs.org>
To: Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>
Cc: ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com>, coff@tuhs.org
Subject: [COFF] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2023 21:18:42 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <m2lek7yp25.fsf@thuvia.hamartun.priv.no> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAEoi9W4nMjhXvv0zeQViWwuR=PYN7eJCto_Y8W_VRqzfM0-p7w@mail.gmail.com> (Dan Cross's message of "Wed, 8 Mar 2023 14:52:43 -0500")
Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> writes:
> About a year ago, I ran across an email written a decade or more prior
> on some mainframe mailing list where someone wrote something like,
> "wow! It just occurred to me that my Athlon machine is faster than the
> ES/3090-600J I used in 1989!" Some guy responded angrily, rising to
> the wounded honor of IBM, raving about how preposterous this was
> because the mainframe could handle a thousand users logged in at one
> time and there's no way this Linux box could ever do that.
>
> I was struck by the absurdity of that; it's such a ridiculous
> non-comparison.
I did one of those. Back in the early nineties, I had a 286 box running
MINIX 1.5 as my home workstation, and a similar one running DOS at work.
My job, however, was as one of a team of sysadmins caring for a VAX-780
running VMS.
I used C-TeX to format documents on the DOS PC, and spent a couple of
days porting it to the VMS C compiler. Performance was utterly dismal
at first, but once I realized that the stdio stuff in the standard
libary was the problem, I modified C-TeX to do output to binary files of
fixed size 512 byte blocks in RMS, the VMS file system. In the small
hours of the night, I discovered that the big and expensive VAX-780 was
able to pretty much exactly match my 286-box when formatting documents.
The very next day, I found that the same machine did the TeX formatting
just as fast, while a hundred or so other people were actively using it
for their own work.
-tih
--
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-03-08 20:18 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 24+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
[not found] <CAP6exY+05fStBtpZGd2HeeNf21fNXeKUTwBV0h5-1YczwF+tew@mail.gmail.com>
2023-03-08 19:52 ` [COFF] Re: [TUHS] " Dan Cross
2023-03-08 20:18 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via COFF [this message]
2023-03-09 1:22 ` [COFF] Re: [TUHS] " John Cowan
2023-03-09 19:55 ` Dan Cross
2023-03-09 20:09 ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-11 20:32 ` Dan Cross
2023-03-11 23:28 ` Bakul Shah
[not found] ` <ZA+gxAePDMWK6StD@straylight.ringlet.net>
2023-03-13 22:34 ` Dan Cross
2023-07-05 21:48 ` Dan Cross
2023-07-05 23:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF
2023-07-06 1:02 ` Dave Horsfall
2023-07-06 16:47 ` Grant Taylor via COFF
2023-07-06 2:35 ` Dan Cross
2023-07-06 4:18 ` Robert Stanford via COFF
2023-07-06 16:53 ` Grant Taylor via COFF
2023-07-06 17:54 ` Adam Thornton
2023-07-09 14:55 ` Michael Parson
2023-08-01 9:52 ` Michael Cardell Widerkrantz
2023-08-01 9:49 ` Michael Cardell Widerkrantz
2023-08-01 15:55 ` Dan Cross
2023-08-01 16:27 ` Grant Taylor via COFF
2023-08-02 16:07 ` Dan Cross
2023-08-02 20:58 ` Grant Taylor via COFF
2023-08-02 21:16 ` Dan Cross
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