History--computer performance comparison chart

[hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com]

Datamation had a chart on comparative performance by computers from 1944 to 1963. Somewhat technical, using a complex formula to evaluation perfomrance. Also includes costs.

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/datamation/ChangesInComputerPerformance_Sep66.pdf

[Peter Flass]

No! An on-topic folklore post. This can never be allowed to happen again
;-)


--
Pete

[Charles Richmond]

"Peter Flass" <peter...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:245644776429482984.9194...@news.eternal-september.org...

If an "on-topic" post is considered "off-topic", then *everything* is
"off-topic". So *no* problem...

--

numerist at aquaporin4 dot com

[Charlie Gibbs]

It's OK if someone posts a followup that's off-topic.

Yes, I suffer from attention deficit dis... say, what's for lunch?

--
/~\ cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!

[hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com]

On Monday, August 11, 2014 8:14:07 PM UTC-4, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> say, what's for lunch?

The deli special today was two hot dogs, saurkraut, soda, and a bag of chips.

I don't know about tomorrow, but my guess is turkey bowl (turkey, mashed pot., stuffing, and gravy.)

Business issue for discussion: this deli does not take credit cards--it's cash only. The owner says the cost of taking cards is too much. Since 99% of his customers are regulars, it does not seem to be a problem. Occasionally, someone comes in who wants to pay with a credit card and does not have enough cash, so once in a great while he loses a sale. But usually people have enough cash on hand to pay for a sandwich.

FWIW, I know of no other business (excepting food stands) that doesn't take credit cards.

[Charlie Gibbs]

Ah, there we go... safely back off topic.

[Michael Black]

Around here, some of the smaller businesses have psoters up encouraging
the non-use of credit cards, at least for small amounts. I think it wsa
part of a campaign going after the credit card companies to lower the
fees, but I can't remember.

They'll take credit cards, but want to discourage them, at least on small
amounts.

Michael

[Walter Bushell]

In article <lsbp3...@news1.newsguy.com>,

Charlie Gibbs <cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

> On 2014-08-12, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com <hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
>
> > On Monday, August 11, 2014 8:14:07 PM UTC-4, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> >
> >> say, what's for lunch?
> >
> > The deli special today was two hot dogs, saurkraut, soda, and a bag
> > of chips.
> >
> > I don't know about tomorrow, but my guess is turkey bowl (turkey,
> > mashed pot., stuffing, and gravy.)
> >
> > Business issue for discussion: this deli does not take credit cards--
> > it's cash only. The owner says the cost of taking cards is too much.
> > Since 99% of his customers are regulars, it does not seem to be a
> > problem. Occasionally, someone comes in who wants to pay with a
> > credit card and does not have enough cash, so once in a great while
> > he loses a sale. But usually people have enough cash on hand to pay
> > for a sandwich.
> >
> > FWIW, I know of no other business (excepting food stands) that doesn't
> > take credit cards.
>
> Ah, there we go... safely back off topic.

Some reasonably expensive restaurants don't either in the $100 per
couple for pasta class. CC are just too expensive. And maybe they hide
some income being paid in cash.

--
Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greed. Me.

[hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com]

On Tuesday, August 12, 2014 12:21:27 AM UTC-4, Michael Black wrote:

> They'll take credit cards, but want to discourage them, at least on small
> amounts.

When general cards like Visa and MasterCard first became widespread, many retailers required a minimum amount in order to use them, roughly $10.

Today, it seems large retailers are happy to take a card for any amount. I suspect this is because (1) they don't have to handle as much cash, (2) a credit card is much safer than a personal check, (3) and customers usually spend more using a credit card than when paying cash.

Unlike years ago, when the cashier had to fill out a slip by hand and then stamp it, today's card transactions go through faster than cash.

obl comp: In the 1960s, the computer industry sold lots of equipment to credit card processors to handle all this. One industry was the oil companies, encouraging credit card usage to buy gas and service. Some oil companies had tie-ins with other business, like Gulf and Holiday Inns.

[Charlie Gibbs]

On 2014-08-12, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com <hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:

> obl comp: In the 1960s, the computer industry sold lots of equipment
> to credit card processors to handle all this. One industry was the
> oil companies, encouraging credit card usage to buy gas and service.
> Some oil companies had tie-ins with other business, like Gulf and
> Holiday Inns.

I was very young at the time, so take this with a grain of salt if
you will, but ISTR in the late '50s my father had an Esso card for
purchases. The bottom copy of the multi-part tear-off credit card
form (like Visa used to have) was card stock punched with standard
rectangular 80-column card holes, although it would have been a
51-column stub card.

[hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com]

On Monday, August 11, 2014 1:15:11 PM UTC-4, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
> Datamation had a chart on comparative performance by computers from 1944 to 1963

Oops, there was a second article covering 1963 through 1967:

http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/datamation/EvolvingComputerPerformance_1963-1967_Jan1968.pdf


Again, this uses hairy statistical analysis and Grosch's Law to come up with its figures.

[Charles Richmond]

"Charlie Gibbs" <cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote in message
news:lsdnt...@news3.newsguy.com...

> On 2014-08-12, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com <hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
>
>> obl comp: In the 1960s, the computer industry sold lots of equipment
>> to credit card processors to handle all this. One industry was the
>> oil companies, encouraging credit card usage to buy gas and service.
>> Some oil companies had tie-ins with other business, like Gulf and
>> Holiday Inns.
>
> I was very young at the time, so take this with a grain of salt if
> you will, but ISTR in the late '50s my father had an Esso card for
> purchases. The bottom copy of the multi-part tear-off credit card
> form (like Visa used to have) was card stock punched with standard
> rectangular 80-column card holes, although it would have been a
> 51-column stub card.
>

<joke>

Question: What kind of bee buzzes around gas stations???

Answer: An Esso bee.

</joke>

[Walter Banks]

It took a long time before real performance was available in processors. Around 1978
I worked on the design of a special purpose processor to handle data packet switching.
It was considerable effort to get it to run with a 10Mhz clock usingTTL logic.

Might be interesting to normalize the data in the two quoted papers and extend it to
processor development post mid 60's

w..

[Jon Elson]

Walter Banks wrote:


>
> It took a long time before real performance was available in processors.
> Around 1978 I worked on the design of a special purpose processor to
> handle data packet switching. It was considerable effort to get it to run
> with a 10Mhz clock usingTTL logic.

Yes, with real 7400 series, even simple gates had up to 20 ns propagation
delay. You had to go to 74Sxx with a large power increase, and only
got modest speed increases. Setup and hold times were also large.

Jon

[Quadibloc]

Earlier today I saw a web page with a graph adapted from the classic text, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach.

It showed computer performance starting with the VAX 11/780 and proceeding through the Alpha 21164 and more recent Intel x86 processors.

The scale on the left was logarithmic, in terms of multiples of the VAX performance.

So the numbers were 10000, 1000, 100, 10... and 0. The performance of the VAX 11/780 was, according to the scale, zero times that of the VAX 11/780.

I was shocked.

http://web.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~rdv/keio/sfc/teaching/architecture/architecture-2008/lec01.html

John Savard

[Walter Bushell]

In article <2abde0b5-de22-45a9...@googlegroups.com>,

I'm shocked. Shocked! I tell you.

log10(1)=0



Just a thoughtless error.

[jmfbahciv]

Walter Bushell wrote:
> In article <2abde0b5-de22-45a9...@googlegroups.com>,
> Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>
>> Earlier today I saw a web page with a graph adapted from the classic text,
>> Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach.
>>
>> It showed computer performance starting with the VAX 11/780 and proceeding
>> through the Alpha 21164 and more recent Intel x86 processors.
>>
>> The scale on the left was logarithmic, in terms of multiples of the VAX
>> performance.
>>
>> So the numbers were 10000, 1000, 100, 10... and 0. The performance of the
VAX
>> 11/780 was, according to the scale, zero times that of the VAX 11/780.
>>
>> I was shocked.
>>
>>
http://web.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~rdv/keio/sfc/teaching/architecture/architecture-200
>> 8/lec01.html
>>
>> John Savard
>
> I'm shocked. Shocked! I tell you.

Will you ever learn not to stir loose bits with your finger? ;-)

>
> log10(1)=0
>
>
>
> Just a thoughtless error.
>

/BAH

[Charlie Gibbs]

On 2014-08-16, Walter Bushell <pr...@panix.com> wrote:

> log10(1)=0

For that matter, log<anybase>(1) = 0

[timca...@aol.com]

Hmmm, interesting of the intersecting systems between the two papers, only
the CDC 3600 has very different performance numbers.

There is also evidence of lots of typos in the tables. e.g. compare IBM 7040
numbers between the two tables.

Still, thanks, very interesting. It shows why the CDC 6600 was so outstanding
when it first came out.

For comparison, see this article:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8400/arms-cortex-m-even-smaller-and-lower-power-cpu-cores

(note the picture with the golf ball)

and see this picture of the CDC 6600:
http://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Electronic/Images/CDC-6600.jpg

The CDC 6000 console was just soooo cool:

http://archive.computerhistory.org/projects/Visible_Storage/Cyber_Exhibit_of_Visible_Storage/Cyber%20Visible%20Storage/CRAY/CDC6600/CDC%206600.jpg

The Cortex-M and the CDC 6600 probably have about the same compute power....
(Actually the Cortex-M is probably faster)

- Tim

[Quadibloc]

On Wednesday, August 20, 2014 4:36:48 PM UTC-6, timca...@aol.com wrote:

> The Cortex-M and the CDC 6600 probably have about the same compute power....
> (Actually the Cortex-M is probably faster)

Only the top-of-the-line M4 even has floating point. And it has a three-stage in-order pipeline (but RISC designs don't need to go out-of-order until the pipeline goes beyond about eight stages). Maybe the higher clock rate with today's tiny transistors will make up for it.

John Savard

[timca...@aol.com]

The M4 is still a Cortex-M.

The CDC 6600 clocked at 10 Mhz, with max 128K words of 1usec memory (although it was arranged in 32 banks) (or about 1MB).

See:
http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/LPC435X_3X_2X_1X.pdf

For a high end M4. 204 Mhz, 1 MB flash, 136KB SRAM. Even if it emulated the FP it would still challenge the 6600.

- Tim

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

timca...@aol.com writes:
> The M4 is still a Cortex-M.
>
> The CDC 6600 clocked at 10 Mhz, with max 128K words of 1usec memory
> (although it was arranged in 32 banks) (or about 1MB).
>
> See:
> http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/LPC435X_3X_2X_1X.pdf
>
> For a high end M4. 204 Mhz, 1 MB flash, 136KB SRAM. Even if it
> emulated the FP it would still challenge the 6600.

I had gotten sucked into benchmarking rain/rain4 on early 4341 for LLNL
looking at getting 70s systems for compute farm; ran in 35.77 seconds on
6600, 36.21secs on 4341 (145secs on 145, 9.1secs on 168-3, 6.77secs on
91). old 4341 email
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#4341

recent post mentioning rain/rain benchmark
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014c.html#61 I Must Have Been Dreaming (36-bit word needed for ballistics?)

also mentionins MWIPS benchmark;
vax/780: .253 (w/o FPA, .76 w/FPA)
vax/750: .510
4341: .770

companies bought 4341s as traditional mainframe, but large organizations
also bought large numbers for datacenter computer farms (early cluster
superecomputers) as well as hundreds for deployments out into
departmental areas (leading edge of distributed computing tsunami).

recent posts mentioning was supposed to interconnect the NSF
supercomputer centers:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#3 We need to talk about TED
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#25 The History of the Grid: Comments invited
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#28 The History of the Grid
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#68 Imprecise Interrupts and the 360/195
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014b.html#4 IBM Plans Big Spending for the Cloud ($1.2B)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014b.html#35 OODA
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014b.html#46 Resistance to Java
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014c.html#21 The PDP-8/e and thread drifT?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014c.html#22 US Federal Reserve pushes ahead with Faster Payments planning
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014c.html#52 First 2014 Golden Goose Award to physicist Larry Smarr
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#35 World Wide Web turns 25 years old
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#52 [CM] Ten recollections about the early WWW and Internet
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#7 Last Gasp for Hard Disk Drives
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#25 Is there any MF shop using AWS service?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#27 TCP/IP Might Have Been Secure From the Start If Not For the NSA
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#36 IBM Historic computing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#75 Is end of mainframe near ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014g.html#98 After the Sun (Microsystems) Sets, the Real Stories Come Out
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#85 The End of the Internet?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#35 curly brace languages source code style quides

recent posts mentioning working on cluster scaleup, then over a period
of a couple weeks, effort was transferred, we were told we couldn't work
on anything with more than four processors, and announced as
supercomputer:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#71 the suckage of MS-DOS, was Re: 'Free Unix!
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014.html#73 the suckage of MS-DOS, was Re: 'Free Unix!
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014b.html#35 OODA
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014c.html#72 11 Years to Catch Up with Seymour
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014c.html#96 11 Years to Catch Up with Seymour
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014d.html#52 [CM] Ten recollections about the early WWW and Internet
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#7 Last Gasp for Hard Disk Drives
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#11 Can the mainframe remain relevant in the cloud and mobile era?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#52 Rather nice article on COBOL on Vulture Central
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014e.html#70 How the Internet wasn't Commercial Dataprocessing
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#39 Before the Internet: The golden age of online services
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#69 Is end of mainframe near ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014f.html#81 Is end of mainframe near ?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014g.html#40 Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#16 Emulating z CPs was: Demonstrating Moore's law
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#17 Emulating z CPs was: Demonstrating Moore's law
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#21 Is end of mainframe near?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#33 Can Ginni really lead the company to the next great product line?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#59 The Tragedy of Rapid Evolution?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#79 EBFAS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014i.html#61 A computer at home?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014i.html#99 The SDS 92, its place in history?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#5 The SDS 92, its place in history?

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

[hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com]

On Thursday, August 21, 2014 4:07:44 PM UTC-4, Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:
> companies bought 4341s as traditional mainframe,

I believe my old employer replaced its S/360-40 with a 4331. (I was gone by that point.)

However, the DP unit was outsourced to a large service bureau which specialized in that industry.

Said employer was subsequently acquired and the parent organization went bankrupt and shut down. The responsible CEO either went to jail or should've gone to jail. One of my former co-workers told me it was nice riding in the corporate helicopter.

[Shmuel Metz]

In <m3lhqh7...@garlic.com>, on 08/21/2014
at 04:07 PM, Anne & Lynn Wheeler <ly...@garlic.com> said:

>timca...@aol.com writes:

>> The CDC 6600 clocked at 10 Mhz, with max 128K words

Don't forget ECS, which could go up to 2 MW (60 bit words).

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>

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