Isn't this a Contradiction in Terms? IBM Dishes Out Small, Low-Power Supercomputer

[Baphomet]

Baphomet wrote:>

Nope, it wasn't Einstein, it was Lewis Strauss (pronounced "straws"
damnit!) Chairman of the old Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) that
said that nuclear energy would be "too cheap to meter". 1954 as I
recall.

He spent his life making sure that he was wrong.

-Chuck

Mea culpa. I couldn't find it at:
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html . It's amazing how
I could have gone some sixty years under that misconception :-(

 

[Ben Bradley]

In sci.electronics.misc,
sci.electronics.design,
alt.binaries.schematics.electronic,

That is called Havard architecture, and its still in common use. See Atmel
AVR processor range.

It's common, even near-universal among DSP's.

 

[Keith R. Williams]

Famous quotes from the past:

Bill Gates said that nobody would ever need more than 64K of RAM

^^^
640K

 

[Baphomet]

^^^
640K

I must have had my Commodore 64 in mind. Whether 64 or 640, it was still a
vast underestimate of future needs. The irony in all of this is that the
future needs were necessitated by Microsoft's Windows.

 

[DarkMatter]

The irony in all of this is that the
future needs were necessitated by Microsoft's Windows.

No matter what was in place, the need would have scaled up with
time, storage space, and computer speed.

No matter what the shit was being run under.

 

[Keith R. Williams]

There is no stretched second syllable either.

You've obviously never listened to William F. Buckley.

 

[Keith R. Williams]

I must have had my Commodore 64 in mind. Whether 64 or 640, it was still a
vast underestimate of future needs.

Of course, though the comment was made about the IBM PC1, which
"limited" the memory to 640K (704K was an easy hack).

The irony in all of this is that the
future needs were necessitated by Microsoft's Windows.

Certainly. Those of us who bought the first PCs with 48K (16K
cassette-only machines were available) knew this was a silly
statement. Within a year, most of us had 640K-704K installed.
....and looking for more.

 

[Baphomet]

No matter what was in place, the need would have scaled up with
time, storage space, and computer speed.

No matter what the shit was being run under.

I'm not exactly sure. It's sometimes hard to tell what is the driving engine
and in reality, both seem to feed off one another. In the early days, it was
considered a badge of honor to provide a more elegant hack (same result -
fewer instructions). We used assembly language to accomplish this...very
fast but reasonably difficult because it was low level and programmer
hostile. Programming language has become very high level which has resulted
in a lot of very sloppy and inefficient coding, requiring much more memory.

 

[Tom Del Rosso]

In Tim Auton typed:

Although Mozilla is certainly superior (how did I ever live without
tabbed browsing and popup blocking?) I still find Acrobat plays silly
buggers with it. It doesn't take the browser with it when it dies, but
it still freezes with distressing regularity.

I still have the install file for version 4 if you want it. I don't
think it has these problems.

 

[Tony Pearce]

You think Mac OSX will run in 640k ?

TonyP.