Re: non-moan about scrolling

Tim Streater <tim.streater@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <fusqab$23et$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Richard Tobin) wrote:

In article <tim.streater-E9986C.15260325042008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Tim Streater <tim.streater@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
When I was a boy, a CPU cycle was really valuable. Look how they've been
devalued over the years. They're only worth about a five-hundredth of
what they were worth then.

Ha, you must be young. I have a program that when I wrote it took
2 minutes if no-one else as using the computer, and now it takes 10mS.

Actually I can better that. The first machine I used was an Elliot 803,
a serial machine. The clock can be said to have run at about 4kHz. So we
are perhaps 500k times faster today.

I thought your 1/500th was a few orders of magnitude out, considering
both the increase in flops and/or cpu cycles, and the decrease in cost
of computer time.

When I was at school, we had the use of a local payroll company's
computer overnight when they weren't using it. The job run printouts
always had "CPU usage" times at the bottom, and excessive CPU seconds
were penalised by being banned from running jobs for a couple of nights.
That, and the once-a-day run schedule, meant that we debugged our
programs very carefully before punching them onto cards for submission.

--
Pd
.

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