Benchmark Wars (was Re: gauging interest in VAX 6000-530)

I remain unconvinced(!). That's certainly true, and nice ancedote w/HP2000 vs 11/55. (Hi Chuck!) Here's my back-of-the-envelope: The 16-bit ISA bus on a 486dx2/66 runs at 8 MHz. The total bus throughput for memory operations is 32 megabits/sec. (4 cycles = 500 ns, 16 bits/cycle). If your dozen uarts are on a memory-mapped card, and you're pumping 19.200 b/s continuously to the dozen uarts, that's 184,320 b/s required by the uarts. That's only about 0.6% of the available bus bandwidth (about one uart transfer every 174 Main Memory references.) Yes, you do have to work hard with such slow memory, and now we understand why cache memory was so important even on dx2/66 motherboards. So, yeah, keeping a dozen terminals blazing output would be "fun" with an ISA-only bus! (Incidentally, I am -not- advocating ISA as some sort of "wunderbus"; on the contrary, I remain amazed that it has taken the PC industry as long as it has to recognize the importance of I/O speed. 64-bit 66 MHz PCI and 2x AGP are steps in the right direction... Yes, the microcomputer industry seems hellbent on re-discovering what the mainframe and mini guys knew 20 or 40 years ago...) --------- Something happened between the days of the 1620 and 1401, and Today; Back Then, Men were Men and programmers knew how to write code that was fast, tiny, and worked great. Today, anything under 100 MB is considered a "small" program... And performance? Ha! Don't make me laugh! Beat it to death with Uncle Gordon Moore's 2x every 18 months, they say... -Mike Cheponis