I love hearing these types of stories, which have a few effects on me:
-Admiration of those who worked with so little to produce so much
-Thankfulness for the resources we have now
-Excitement for the forthcoming technogies
-Despair about using current technologies, knowing they will be
supplanted in a few years
Regarding the last point, does anybody have a good response to the
Moore's law conundrum that some programs which will take, say, ten
years to run now will take only ~1 year to run 8 years from now,
making it futile to run the program now? Maybe it is never worth it to
run such processes, assuming Moore's law will continue?
Another question: Dale Tronrud mentioned the disconnect between clock
speed and actual processor performance. Is there a simple way to
understand this disconnect? I have wondered for a long time about this
now, especially since it is often raised as a rationalization for
using Mac's even though the dollar:processorHz is much higher in Mac's
than PC's.
Jacob Keller
On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 4:16 AM, Robert Esnouf <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> At times DEC we innovative in ways that no hardware company
> today even comes close. But I guess innovation and commercial
> success do not go hand in hand. OK, this is abridged from
> Wikipedia, but much of it is true...
>
> Digital supported/developed the ANSI standards, especially the
> ASCII and multinational character sets.
>
> The first versions of the C language and the Unix operating
> system ran on Digital's PDP series of computers
>
> Digital produced the first pure 64-bit microprocessor,
> AlphAXP.
>
> Digital collaborated on the Ethernet standard and made the
> commercially success it is today.
>
> Digital, though their Hierarchical Storage Controllers,
> delivered the first hardware RAID.
>
> Digital was the primary sponsor for the X Window System
> project (project Athena).
>
> Digital was one of the first businesses connected to the
> Internet with dec.com, registered in 1985, being one of the
> very first .com domains. Digital was also the first computer
> vendor to open a public website, on October 1, 1993.
> AltaVista, created by Digital, was one of the first
> comprehensive Internet search engines. (Although Lycos was
> earlier, it was much more limited.)
>
> DEC invented Digital Linear Tape (DLT) which was so much more
> reliable than helical scan technologies such as DAT.
>
> Digital were even developing the forerunner of the iPod (a
> hard-disk based MP3 player) back in 1998 before the merger
> with Compaq.
>
>
> Regards,
> Robert
>
> --
>
> Dr. Robert Esnouf,
> University Research Lecturer
> and Head of Research Computing,
> Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics,
> Roosevelt Drive, Oxford OX3 7BN, UK
>
> Emails: [log in to unmask] Tel: (+44) - 1865 - 287783
> and [log in to unmask] Fax: (+44) - 1865 - 287547
>
--
*******************************************
Jacob Pearson Keller
Northwestern University
Medical Scientist Training Program
cel: 773.608.9185
email: [log in to unmask]
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