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Cray MIPS are FLOPS (roughly).

Mac MIPS are what? Most likely, Meaningless Operations Per Second.

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Supercomputer in 1976: 80 MHz and 8MB RAM, 64 bit, multi-user, multi-tasking, UNIX.

x86 PC at this time: does not exist.

x86 PC ten years later, in 1986: One i286 processor with 10 MHz 1 MB RAM, 8 / 16 Bit, no usable UNIX, no multi-tasking. Ugly design instead.

And even today, there is... :-)

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Errr, no... the Cray-1 did not ran UNICOS (unix version from CRAY), it ran COS. Which was not really much of an OS for interactive use. UNICOS came much later, and at least in the early CRAYs it was pretty much useless.

Most CRAYs (and supers for that matter) during the 70s and 80s were ran as a queue system, a sort of co-processor to the front end machine which would handle most of the user interactions. Normally in the case of CRAYs there used to be mini or mainframe (VAX, CDC, etc).

CRAYs were basically a fast floating point coprocessor, never intended for interactive use. In fact they were notoriously bad as time-shared systems.

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80286 wasn't all that bad: There were many operating systems that utilized the 80286 protected mode: OS/2 1.x, Venix, SCO Xenix 286, Coherent and others.

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Wow. Todays systems can beat a 80Mhz system from 1975. Whats your point?

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"people like you"

With this words, you just describe yourself, hylas. But you don't describe these other poeple

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You gave absolutely no indication of what you were getting at in your post, other than TEH MAC=TEH FASTAR which, frankly, came off as not only snobish, but silly, especially when you consider there's nothing special about what the Mac can do now that it's x86 just like "everyone else." It's no surprise that you're getting a dose of blowback.

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I like macintoshes too, fwiw. I did not mod you down, and wouldn't mod you down for something like that anyhow. My point was that all you posted were specs of 2 totally unrelated machines in a totally non-sequitur fashion.

I have no idea wtf you're getting at with the remainder of your last post - I'm not acting like a hall monitor, and I have no idea wtf you mean when you question my "relevancy."

Have a nice day.

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"I saw a Cray-1 some year ago at the Deutsches Museum in Munich."

I saw a cray (but I think it wasn't a Cray-1) running at the university data processing center of the university "Otto von Guericke" in Magdeburg. I even touched it. Wow, what a power...

"Hell, I actually sat on it, literally! "

Cray furniture, SGI dishes and Sun inventory make every flat become a place worth living in. :-)

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Either what they did is pretty impressive with the machines they had back then....or the conspiracy theorists may have a point

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"Either what they did is pretty impressive with the machines they had back then....or the conspiracy theorists may have a point "

In addition, I think most modern cars contain more computing power than the whole Apollo program, so why don't they land on the moon? Many parking lots could be freed this way. :-)

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The atom bomb was designed using mechanical calculators. In the 18th century the British used savants to calculate navigation tables. They needed to be able to mentally calculate 8 figure logarithms.

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The atom bomb was designed using mechanical calculators.

Yes, they were Monroe hand driven mechanical calculators. At Los Alamos they had a very large room filled with locally hired woman operating them. Designing how the calculations were split up amongst the many operators (parallel computing?) was Nobel prizewinner to be and bongo drummer Dick Feynman. His title was "Director of Computers".

This isn't the only contribution Feynman made to computer science. Many years later when his son was working for Connection Machines he took a years sabbatical to work there. While he was there he worked out the foundational principles of quantum computing. he also solved problems in parallel processing using differential equations. No one had ever thought you could solve computer science problems using differential equations before, as they apply to continuous variables. However a continuum can be used to represent an underlying discrete substratum. If we take the idea of quantum gravity seriously, then every time we use differential equations to model physical reality we are doing just that.

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''Yes, they were Monroe hand driven mechanical calculators. At Los Alamos they had a very large room filled with locally hired woman operating them. [...] [Dick Feynman's] title was "Director of Computers".''

No, not operators - computers. In these days, people doing such kind of calculations were called "computer" (AE) or "computor" (BE) theirselves. "I work as a computer" has been a valid sentence. Today, we use the same term for the device that is operated, not the person who's doing it.

The term operator was present up to... hmm... let's assume 1990 - 2000 when supercomputers and mainframe installations didn't need special personnel to be maintained. The operator of today does not touch the machines anymore, he can be glad to change the paper in the printer - no comparison to the responsibilities of a former OP1 (shift supervisor) at data processing centers.

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Obligatory: We never landed on the moon!

:)

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hahaha. Yeah, that was my initial impression too

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