Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 08:41:12 05/16/01
Go up one level in this thread
On May 16, 2001 at 06:15:32, David Blackman wrote: > >>>HP 2100 >Another 16 bit mini, i think. Slower than most of the 3000s? > main claim to fame for the 2100 was it was microprogrammable. By the user. I wrote a software simulator for this architecture for a process controll course we taught. It was pretty slow, but since you could do your own microcode instructions in firmware, you could design some neat instructions that would make it appear to be fast. > >>The /360 model 91 was very fast... same for the 195 /370 machine. >>They were mainframes with 100x the I/O thruput of today's micros, but >>not as fast cpu-wise. > >The IO on these monsters was quite good, but not that good. A few MB/sec per >channel with potentially lots of channels. A well equiped modern micro has about >the same total IO throughput, not counting video. IBM claimed the CPUs were >faster than a CDC6600, but most people who used both disagree. The 91 was faster. It was a fantastic machine with a deep set of pipelines, for that day. As far as I/O goes, I have seen old 360's that could sustain > 100mbytes/second on I/O aggregate over many "selector channels". I don't think you can find a single PC today that can match this. The PCI bus is just too slow... And when you go to other 1970's era hardware, you run into the Cray-1, which could do 100X the I/O thruput of todays micros. For a hint on the I/O capability, check out the "SSD (solid-state storage devices)" pseudo-disks they could use. > >PDP-10 was mostly compatible with the PDP-6, but much more reliable. Various >models ranged from about 0.5 MIPS to about 3 MIPS. Very nice machines, but >horribly slow by modern standards. These were very popular especially at >universities, and huge numbers of programmers who started in the 1970s learned >on a PDP-10. Greenblatt's MacHack was installed on many of the university >machines, usually playable only at night or on weekends. I played it a few >times. > >11/45 was a 16 bit mini of about 0.8 mips. Quite nice except the small address >space. This was the classic UNIX machine for most of the 1970s, but DEC also >sold at least three of their own operating systems for it. On a modern pc of >about 200MHz or more, there are public domain simulators that will emulate a >11/45 faster than the real thing. > >I once saw one of Ken Thompsons early chess programs running emulated like this. >Fascinating, but a very weak program. He obviously made a lot of software >improvements as well as getting special hardware for Belle. > >>>GCS Alpha 16 >? > >>>MANIAC I > >Truly ancient. Probably a few thousand instructions per second. > >>>UNIVAC 1106,1110, 1108, 494, 418III >> >>the 1106, 08 and 10 were fast machines. 36 bit words, good FP, but not >>up to today's standards by a long way. >> >>>Varian 620i > >>>Xerox Data Systems 940 > >Didn't Blitz run on one of these once? I don't know anything about it, but i >would have expected Bob to comment. No. We used a xerox sigma-9, almost every year except for 1978 when we ran on a dual-processor Univac 1100-42 (dual cpu 1106-speed machine). The xerox machine was a .7 mip computer, but it had a beastly I/O throughput. Our swapping device could actually start swapping in a program and if the cpu started to execute the program as soon as the first instruction was read in, it would _never_ catch up to the swapping read-in. That one device was rated at about 7mb/sec sustained forever. > >>>ICL 4/70, 1909/5 >>>M-20 >> >>The ICL was a piece of trash. > >Yes. The uni i went to had one before they upgraded to the DEC PDP-10. Actually >the ICL was reasonably fast, maybe 2 MIPS or so, but it was so unreliable that >most of the scientific programs at our uni didn't have enough time to run >between crashes. Even ignoring that, it was very user unfriendly. Everyone was >very happy when they got the PDP-10, even though it was more expensive and not >necessarily faster. > >>> >>>Any Info would be appreciated. Thankyou >> >> >>None of those machines approach today's speeds overall, although most would >>bury a micro in terms of I/O throughput today. Many would bury a micro in >>terms of memory bandwidth also. > >This was more or less true up to about 1990, but not any more. And it only >applies to the supers and some mainframes, not the minis. I agree about the minis. But the big CDC/Cray/UNIVAC/IBM mainframes were I/O monsters. Still are. That is the one place where today's PCs simply get left in the dust.
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