3 ms·
>"Seek/read time on these machines was on the order of a second, so a 10 level binary search could take around 10 seconds of total time. Unfortunately for IBM,
by bogomipz 9y ago
>"Seek/read time on these machines was on the order of a second, so a 10 level binary search could take around 10 seconds of total time. Unfortunately for IBM, this wasn't an improvement over the best human-driven manual lookup processes"
I am curious what human-driven manual lookup processes existed that could be in a single second?
- brian_cloutier 9y agoI have no information as to what the parent is referring to but 2^10 is 1024. That seems roughly in line with what a double-page spread of a phone book could show you; I don't think it's unreasonable that a trained human could search through one of those in under 10 seconds.
- mschaef 9y agoA tub file: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tub_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tub_file (Note that the overall search takes 10 seconds, not the one second of an individual seek... so the human had a bit more time to be competitive with the disk than a single second. :-) )