RSD,
>>Why would folks use NT on slow INTEL chips when greater speed ...<<
I'm not really saying that here! When I started on computers, the computer room held 1 computer. One could walk in and 'lean' on the memory bank! Hell, the 'core' memory was in a 'frame' that was 5'x5' with supporting frames, each side 18" deep and 12 1/2 feet long! The 'adder' was a separate 'line up'! And on and on it went! Only the government could run this baby, a duplex computer system, 50,000 vacuum tubes and 120 consoles! Steady state load 3,000KW! We had 6 970 bhp diesels, of which 4 had to be online to run the system!
By todays standards - let's see:
Main memory - 64K (0-65,536) - 32+parity bit words
Little memory - 4K (0-4095) - 32+parity bit words
6 Main and 6 Aux drums containing another 48K of storage
Cycle time - 12 micro seconds! Main clock 1Mhz!
I can remember that sucker could do 166,666 additions per second! Boy was I impressed! We watched 867,000 square miles of air space tracking all of the aircraft in the air at the time, and able to send fighter interceptors up at a moments notice!
Today 450Mhz CPUs running 128M of RAM and a 13G Hard disk is standard!
Future, when does 'fastest' cease to make a 'difference'? I submit, that except for the graphic intensive uses, we are just about there!
JMHO
Regards,
Ken |
