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>And also, oxen were absolutely bred to be bigger. That's kind of the defining thing that distinguishes draft oxen from other kinds of cattle. In your attempt
by kortilla 2y ago
>And also, oxen were absolutely bred to be bigger. That's kind of the defining thing that distinguishes draft oxen from other kinds of cattle.
In your attempt to take down the analogy you just reinforced it. They quickly hit the limits of large oxen and had to scale up far faster than any selective breeding could help.
The exact same thing happened in computing even during the absolute hay day of Moore’s law. Workloads would very quickly hit the ceiling of a single server and the way to unblock yourself was not to wait for next gen chips but to parallelize.
- crmd 2y agoThe Sun E10k/15k was the last big ox in my tech career. I miss the big ox days.
- bunderbunder 2y agoIt's not that multiprocessing systems didn't exist at the time Hopper delivered this lecture; it's that they remained fairly niche products for computing researchers and fairly deep-pocketed organizations. At the time, multiprocessing was still very difficult to pull off. It wasn't necessarily analogous to just yoking two oxen to the same cart. It was maybe more like a world where the time it takes to breed an ox that's twice as strong is comparable to the time it takes to develop a working yoke for state-of-the-art oxen, and also nobody's quite sure how to drive a two-oxen team because it's still such a new idea. So the parallel option wasn't as sure of a bet from a business perspective as it is now.