24 Oct
1999
24 Oct
'99
10:01 a.m.
Several people have gone after this topic many different times. It can't be
"won." It can't be won because computers are tools and one can always find
an application that makes less efficient use of the tool to "prove" their
point.
If you're doing ray tracing, get a fast PC.
If you're timesharing dozens of people, a VAX is not a bad choice.
Its all about "balance" and truly good designers can get good balance for
the task at hand without being stuck in some rut. My favorite example was
the HP2000 with BASIC supporting 40 users. In our lab at school we had one
of the "fast" ones (it had some addon from a floating point company (FPS?))
and it was considered too pokey for anything compared to the 11/55. But
over in the business school the very same model (sans FP, but same group of
machines donated by HP) was comfortably running what seemed like zillions
of HP terminals in HPBASIC. Balance.
--Chuck
(For Mike, have you ever actually run a 486 based PC architecture machine
with a dozen actual serial interfaces connected to terminals? It is
instructive because the damn things saturate the ISA bus and no disk
traffic happens at all! On a PCI equipped bus with the users coming over
the network via telnet its workable, but for terminal based I/O the DEC
timeshare systems were (and probably still are) the best that you can buy.)