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On 7 Nov 2007, at 11:45, Rob Beard wrote: > Quoting Tom Potts <tompotts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > >> On Wednesday 07 November 2007 09:48, Clare Shepherd wrote: >>> I've just read an interesting article in the Make magazine daily >>> newsletter about the above. VMS is open now and owned by HP. As it's >>> a paid sub, I've posted the news item. I thought some here might >>> find >>> it of passing interest. >>> >>> Gareth Williams, associate director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical >>> Observatory Minor Planet Center since 1990, has been tracking the >>> 400,000 orbits of known asteroids and comets in the solar system >>> using a cluster of 12 VAXes, from offices on the Harvard University >>> campus. The Deutsche Börse stock exchange in Frankfurt runs on VMS. >>> The Australian Stock Exchange runs on it. The train system in >>> Ireland, Irish Rail, runs on it, as does the Amsterdam police >>> department. The U.S. Postal Service runs its mail sorters on >>> OpenVMS, >>> and Amazon.com uses it to ship 112,000 packages a day. It has "a >>> very >>> loyal installed base of customers," says Ann McQuaid, general >>> manager >>> of OpenVMS at HP, who shows no signs of wanting to give it up. >>> >>> If anyone is interested in more here's a link to the original >>> article >>> in Information Week: http://www.informationweek.com/news/ >>> showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202801794 >>> >>> Clare >> When I was a chip designer with BT in the 80s we used a VAX780 >> running VMS >> it ran at 1 MIP!!! It catered for ~15 engineers and about 30 >> secretaries. >> There was an office package on it that was more 'integrated' than >> anything >> I've seen since. A friend wrote a piece of code for it called >> Krunge which >> took a document and swapped some of the words for similar sounding >> or spelt >> words. It was fun watching krunged documents agreed in meetings >> despite being >> almost meaningless. >> I used to have a bit of code that crashed and loaded me up in the >> debugger >> with what we'd now call su or kernel privileges which was great >> for upping >> the priority on my batch runs! >> Now some 20 years later you can stick windows on a computer 1000 >> times as >> powerful and your productivity is probably 1/30th of what it was >> then. >> Prettier though... >> Tom te tom te tom >> >> > > Wow, 1 MIP? > > I recently downloaded a series called The Computer Programme. It was > a BBC series from 1982 (The year of Information Technology according > to the government - at least thats what it said on the first > episode). It was mainly biased towards the BBC Micro but it did show > other computers (one episode featured a robot being controlled by a > Sinclair ZX80!). > > They showed the Cray-1 super computer. They said that it runs at > about 100 Mips. At the end of the show there was this guy who was > talking about the future of computers and how in 10 the Japanese were > hoping to have a computer which was 100 times more powerful, and in 20 > years we'd probably have machines over 100 times more powerful on our > desks. Wasn't far off to be honest. > > Rob > > > > > -- > The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG > http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list > FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html Sounds interesting I must seek it out. Clare -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html