9 Mar
2023
9 Mar
'23
2:18 a.m.
Dan Cross <crossd(a)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