whartung wrote:
I think the lesson more so today is not so much how much more powerful the machines are today, but, rather, much more slower the software is.
There is no longer an incentive to writing efficient code. Not helping is that the languages being used these days are veritable resource hogs compared to what we used 25-30 years ago.
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That why I gasp at the sheer power of something like the Raspberry Pi, yet, how, apparently, little you can do with it today.
A top fuel dragster has enormous power as well, yet is essentially useless as a means of transportation—especially if you want to go more than a quarter mile.
I see gadgets such as the Raspberry Pi as just that: gadgets. One of them may be able to execute millions more instructions per second than my POC V2 unit. However, I have my doubts that the Pi is more useful.
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My largest old system was a 50Mhz 68030 machine, the Alpha Micro AM-3000. We ran 150 users on that machine. All running programs written in BASIC, against an ISAM database. The true power of that machine was the I/O hardware to handle all of the users terminal connections. AMOS, the OS, was crude. But for driving business apps like we wrote, it met the need.
I recall that machine. It ran a form of SMC BASIC, if memory serves me, which was one of the two major timesharing BASIC families that descended from the minis of the 1970s. The ISAM database engine in the BASIC interpreter was very efficient, usually able to complete a record lookup in a couple of milliseconds. That was quite impressive for a non-RISC machine at the time.
One of
our two Linux boxes has
Thoroughbred's Dictionary-IV installed, as we support several clients who run their businesses on that environment. This Linux machine was built out of recycled parts and is powered by two AMD Opteron 246 MPUs, which was new hardware back in 2006. Thoroughbred can do an end-to-end search of an inventory database of 7000+ records in about three seconds, an average of 2300+ records per second, each record being about 3KB data. The BogoMIPS for the system is a hair under 8000. For comparison, our file and print server, which runs on AMD Opteron multi-core technology, has a BogoMIPS of 22,500 with a single MPU. I have a second MPU sitting on the shelf and if I remember some day to find a socket-F MPU cooler, will install it just for giggles.
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I, too, replaced lots of old machines with SPARC pizza boxes, or other RISC towers. See a SPARCStation plugged in to a terminal concentrator far larger than it was. Green screen, 19.2K terminals. Lot of stuff got done on those old, creaky, things. A lot of stuff still gets done on those old, creaky things.
Up until 2006, every UNIX system we installed connected to a gaggle of terminals (mostly WYSE 60s). In 1997, we started using Equinox's SuperSerial (SST) hardware in our UNIX (and later Linux) servers. Unlike the other concentrators we had used in the past, the Equinox SST hardware had a lot of intelligence and did almost all of the the grunt work in processing serial I/O. The volume of interrupts being generated greatly decreased and as a result, we saw significant performance improvements when a lot of users were busy.
The largest such system we installed was in 1997 at Graham Paint & Varnish Inc. in Chicago. The server was powered by an AMD K6-2 MPU running at a screaming 300 MHz, with 64MB RAM and an all-SCSI storage subsystem (even the CD-ROM was SCSI). We used Equinox's SST hardware, with four 32-port panels attached to the controller card in the server. A total of 102 terminals, 16 (serial) printers and two modems were attached. As this was a factory with a lot of floor space, we used up a huge amount of CAT5 UTP to wire up everything—I seem to recall that we went through nine or ten 1000 foot boxes by the time we were done.
The system worked great and when my then-partner and I finished the installation and got everyone up and running on the new hardware, the company threw a "new computer system" party.
Of course, if you had seen the ancient Basic 4 mini that it replaced, you too would have partied. The gal who handled accounts receivable was astonished that a trial balance could now be computed in three seconds, instead of three hours.
The largest system we currently have in service running the Thoroughbred Dictionary-IV environment has 35-40 concurrent users, all of whom who use Dynacomm terminal emulation software to get access. That machine also runs Samba and typically supports 100+ Windows client connections. The server doesn't even work up a sweat with that load (it's powered by an eight core Opteron MPU, total BogoMIPS being about 32,000). Despite several attempts over the years to modernize their software and get away from Thoroughbred they have stuck with it because it works, is very fast and very stable.
BTW, the most powerful server we've shipped to date, as measured in BogoMIPS, has a 16-core Opteron, for a total of 67,000 BogoMIPS, along with serial attached SCSI (SAS) for storage. It would easily support 400+ users.