4 ms·
We had a Burroughs 6700, at some point (late 70s) we agreed to pay for what was called the "$50,000 screwdriver" which upped the clock speed - we wrote a contr
by Taniwha 5y ago
We had a Burroughs 6700, at some point (late 70s) we agreed to pay for what was called the "$50,000 screwdriver" which upped the clock speed - we wrote a contract where we would run a benchmark before and after and if it wasn't X% faster we wouldn't have to pay. We ran the before benchmark, the field engineer went into the cabinets to up the speed, came back looking sheepish, seems he'd regularly been turning the clock speed up during preventative maintenance sessions to make sure the machine was performing OK and at some point had forgotten to turn it back .... we didn't have to pay
- cyberpunk 5y agoHahaha, that's great :}
- Taniwha 5y agoAlso I designed a Mac graphics accelerator gate array back in the late 80s, we were worried that the promised VRAM performance would not be fast enough so I designed in the ability to add extra clocks to RAS and CAS timings - it ran at full speed which was great, but marketing wanted a lower price-point version of the graphics card so we sold one with a ROM that turned on those extra RAS/CAS clocks