> 10 GOTO 10
> Parallelize THAT.
By the 1970's many timesharing and batch type compilers would kick out the
embarrassingly useless programs without even trying (the environment
well tested by millions of college student's programming attempts).
I think the line between embarrassingly useless and embarrassingly parallel
may not always be obvious. In many university-type batch processing systems,
student programs that ran for more than 5 CPU seconds were summarily
terminated as "obviously being stuck in some kind of infinite loop that the compiler
can't catch yet". Just a few
years later the same problems probably qualified for Grand Challenge grants :-)
I remember when a very big fear of the US govt, was that the Japanese would
wipe us out with Fifth Generation computers. (The WMD of the 80's)
Boy, did that miss the mark. The Japanese came up with the Fuji Eagle (perhaps
the most defining commodity-computing storage element ever) and today
teraflop-class vector processors are in every fanboy's computer and
they're called "graphics cards".
Tim.
