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About 10 years ago, I bought a Cray YMP (the "Baby Cray") because it
was a supercomputer of it's day. 8 processors (wow!) and 2 gig of
memory (unheard of). Brought it home and had to run a separate 220v
line to the computer room and change out the power connector on the
Cray to match what was commercially available around here. When I
fired it up (and fire is the correct term,) the OS and all compilers
and libraries were intact! Woohoo. <br>
I could live with the quite loud fan noise, but within minutes I
realized I had a new whole-house heating system! So, I could only
turn it on for specific experiments and tinkering and couldn't run
it for more than 30 minutes at a time. Bah humbug. So I sold it in
a few months. <sigh><br>
Cray had *awesome* compilers, especially with the automagic
multiprocessor load spreading. I bet SGI bought the Cray company
just for those compiler technologies.<br>
<br>
David Merchant<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 03/20/2015 05:35 PM, WebDawg wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:CAKdd5H8FkEZzFfWmm0yfGxUPaj1UnmQ6DdnJo1oc1=GBTw3Aqw@mail.gmail.com"
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 3:17 PM,
david <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:ainut@knology.net" target="_blank">ainut@knology.net</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
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<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> Boy, does that
bring back memories! I jumped into the home computer
world in 1977 and instantly became evangelistic for the
concept, for home and businesses. Sold my first
commercial program in 1978. Not even floppies were
available for the Apple II at that time.<br>
<br>
I still look back in wonder at WHY in the world did I
pay $1,998 for a 5 meg hard drive in 1981 or so, for an
IBM PC. But that is how I now make my living. In '77,
$1,698 for an Apple II with a whopping 48K (yes,
kilobytes) of memory; did not include monitor or tape
drive, and floppies were not available. That was just
for the system. It only did 40 characters per line back
then because it was built to use normal TV's for
monitors. It was so funny watching the UPS guy's eyes
get bigger and bigger as I counted out the cash to give
him when the Apple was delivered! Back then, $1700 was
like a quarter of some people's annual salary. I was
hooked and hooked bad. :) I bet I spent I spent more
on computer books, magazines, and software than I did
for the hardware per year. :)<br>
<br>
It also ruined my body but now we know more about the
ergonomics. <sigh> I remember reading a
multi-page article about ergo in 1978 or so and thought
yeah, these guys have great ideas. I adopted most of
them, but remember, that was way before mice were used.
<br>
<br>
David Merchant
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<div>Interesting words. <br>
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