3 ms·
Where I worked (a digital electronics simulation company in the late 1980's), we said that PC's had "user interface MIPs" but not "CPU MIPs". A VAX 11/780 (siz
by pedasmith 8y ago
Where I worked (a digital electronics simulation company in the late 1980's), we said that PC's had "user interface MIPs" but not "CPU MIPs".
A VAX 11/780 (size of a refrigerator) had more CPU power, but access was via RS232 link to a VT100 terminal. These could be pretty slow: it wasn't unusual to type a command line and wait up to 10 seconds (or a minute, in really bad times) to get a response. And a graph could easily take a minute to fully display on a VT240 graphics terminal.
A PC on the other hand had "user interface MIPs" and could display a graph instantly. What the PC couldn't do is run our very large, 32-bit required simulation code.
(As far as how easy it was to add a hard drive: at the time, to add a new disk to a sun station, you had to recompile the kernel)
- walshemj 8y agoSounds like you where using an overloaded VAX then the PR!ME 550 (similar tech and a competitor to VAX) we had at my fist job never had such sluggish performance. And Vt240 was very much noddy graphics high end then was insanely expensive vector systems from HP os Tectronix
- pedasmith 8y agoTwenty programmers on one vax and actually doing the simulations is CPU intensive. The VT240 is what our customers had (and they are expensive enough all by themselves; a single VT340 in 1991 was $3600.
- jonhendry18 8y agoMy dad brought a Tektronix 4051 home from work when I was a teenager, so that was one of the computers I grew up with back in the 1980s. I didn't realize at the time how expensive those were.