17 Feb
2022
17 Feb
'22
6:36 p.m.
Sad news. Had read her papers in BSTJ early in my career. Very interesting
to read of her career, and thanks for the links.
I'm a daily/weekly "dc" guy (RPN ftw).
Never got into bc. Occasionally used eqn et al.
-----
Wicat 150WS 27.3 sec
Unison 32.6 sec
Unison must have been real slow!
Dave H. -- remember LSC's ads/posters:
"WICAT with *new* GLTC Technology"
Lionel/someone just made up the term.
For a while no-one asked, eventually it was revealed to stand for "Goes
Like The Clappers". ("A Wet Week" more like it)
Fortunately I supported the Unix stuff from LSC Brisbane/Qld. So in my
first UNIX job I got to play with Sun2-Sun4, lots'a Pyramids, one Convex.
Don't recall LSC's Gould though; before I joined?
When our sales reps sold WICAT (68000 or 68020?) it was mostly running PICK
ported by a bloke in our office (another Dave? I recall him destroying a
phone in frustration over the UART/terminal driver). Weird O/S: efficient
on-disk hashed DB; but very prone to corruption on unclean shutdown.
On Thu, 17 Feb 2022, 06:30 Dave Horsfall, <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
On Wed, 16 Feb 2022, Leah Neukirchen wrote:
Apparently it was a popular benchmark back in the
day:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V05.1.pdf
Yep.
> The benchmark was "echo 99k2vp8opq I
/bin/time dc > /dev/null’. It
> uses dc (the desk calculator) to calculate the square root of 2 to 99
> decimal places,
Ugh; that "I" ought to be "|" (and I can see other typos), so
someone
really needs to proofread those PDF scans if they're going to be regarded
as authoritative. Yes, I can help...
> This benchmark has been applied to a large
number of machines° It has
> (up until now) been useful because most manufacturers have not
> optimised dc, so the results are not likely to have been distorted by
> attempts to optimise for benchmarks.
Indeed, when a lot of compilers recognised the Sieve of Eratosthenes being
used and optimised for it... Wasn't all that long ago that vehicle
manufacturers also started doing the same thing :-)
> Wicat 150WS 27.3 sec
> Unison 32.6 sec
The WICAT 150 was just a terminal with several serial ports, and was
p*ss-awful (I worked for Lionel Singer, and had to support the poxy
thing); I'm surprised that it beat another box, though...
I looks like V7 dc used 100-limbs internally, so
printing in decimal was
fast, but printing in octal required conversion.
Yep; extra work for the CPU. Not much of a benchmark these days, as CPUs
are really fast; when I was supporting Unify I used to use its automatic
tutorial as a benchmark, and I used to joke that I needed a calendar on
some boxes...
Trivia: Lionel Singer also sold the then-new Sun-3, and we had one set up
at an AUUG conference, giggling whenever someone tried that benchmark;
what they didn't know was that the prominent window was actually an
"rlogin" to the Gould that we also sold... The looks on their faces were
priceless :-)
-- Dave