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Quoting Tom Potts <tompotts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > On Wednesday 07 November 2007 09:48, Clare Shepherd wrote: >> I've just read an interesting article in the Make magazine daily >> newsletter about the above. VMS is open now and owned by HP. As it's >> a paid sub, I've posted the news item. I thought some here might find >> it of passing interest. >> >> Gareth Williams, associate director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical >> Observatory Minor Planet Center since 1990, has been tracking the >> 400,000 orbits of known asteroids and comets in the solar system >> using a cluster of 12 VAXes, from offices on the Harvard University >> campus. The Deutsche Börse stock exchange in Frankfurt runs on VMS. >> The Australian Stock Exchange runs on it. The train system in >> Ireland, Irish Rail, runs on it, as does the Amsterdam police >> department. The U.S. Postal Service runs its mail sorters on OpenVMS, >> and Amazon.com uses it to ship 112,000 packages a day. It has "a very >> loyal installed base of customers," says Ann McQuaid, general manager >> of OpenVMS at HP, who shows no signs of wanting to give it up. >> >> If anyone is interested in more here's a link to the original article >> in Information Week: http://www.informationweek.com/news/ >> showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202801794 >> >> Clare > When I was a chip designer with BT in the 80s we used a VAX780 running VMS > it ran at 1 MIP!!! It catered for ~15 engineers and about 30 secretaries. > There was an office package on it that was more 'integrated' than anything > I've seen since. A friend wrote a piece of code for it called Krunge which > took a document and swapped some of the words for similar sounding or spelt > words. It was fun watching krunged documents agreed in meetings despite being > almost meaningless. > I used to have a bit of code that crashed and loaded me up in the debugger > with what we'd now call su or kernel privileges which was great for upping > the priority on my batch runs! > Now some 20 years later you can stick windows on a computer 1000 times as > powerful and your productivity is probably 1/30th of what it was then. > Prettier though... > Tom te tom te tom > > Wow, 1 MIP? I recently downloaded a series called The Computer Programme. It was a BBC series from 1982 (The year of Information Technology according to the government - at least thats what it said on the first episode). It was mainly biased towards the BBC Micro but it did show other computers (one episode featured a robot being controlled by a Sinclair ZX80!). They showed the Cray-1 super computer. They said that it runs at about 100 Mips. At the end of the show there was this guy who was talking about the future of computers and how in 10 the Japanese were hoping to have a computer which was 100 times more powerful, and in 20 years we'd probably have machines over 100 times more powerful on our desks. Wasn't far off to be honest. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html