Retrospective or, misleading hindsight.

I was helping a fellow with a writeup on the CDC STAR-100 (circa 1974) and stumbled across some of the old manuals on bitsavers. You know, back in 1975, the machine was arguably the fastest in the world (I won't get into benchmark results, but it was definitely in competition with Cray). I'd forgotten that the maximum memory available was a megaword (64-bit words) and that standard was half a meg. Back around then, being able to run linpack really fast mattered a lot--and gave rise to oddball ventures like Saxpy (the company, not the subroutine, although the two are not unrelated). Consider that that's 8MB by today's standards, barely enough to host Windows 98. On the other hand, the CPU is still pretty complex by today's standards--and we had 256 64-bit registers to work with. I guess it's like one's childhood home. When you return decades later to visit, you can't get over how SMALL everything seems. Cheers, Chuck