Whitechapel Computer Works MG-1 + Whetstone benchmmark

From: "David Brownlee" <abs at absd.org> The keyboard was all kinds of awful, the mouse had a metal ball that needed the right mat to get any traction and its buttons kept popping off. It made the contemporary sun 3/50 seem like an amazing speed demon, and in a university lab of 20 I'm not sure i ever saw all machines working. People would pick an adm5 in preference to a Whitechapel - for an adm3a the decision was less clear cut. As you can tell, I miss them and wish I had been able to keep hold of one :) <<<< At the University to which abs is referring above, I wrote the operational requirement that led to the the purchase of those machines. I thought I still had a copy but can't find it at the moment. Three proposals made the shortlist: Apollo, Sun, and Whitechapel but, essentially, the MG-1s were the only proposal that offered enough machines to be useful for a teaching room. (for the same money ISTR that Apollo offered 3 machines!, can't remember how many Sun offered but, looking at the benchmark results, they couldn't have had FPUs) At the next major procurement Sun had clearly learned a lesson. We got huge quantities of 386is at a brilliant price (they only guaranteed in the contract to supply the minimal model but a large proportion of them were better than that including some with large colour screens) I acquired one of the (by then) redundant MG-1s but passed it on to someone else when my PC was seriously outperforming it. Talking of benchmark results MG-1 tested at 145 Kwips (slightly worse - 136.5 - non-optimised) Sun (model unknown) at 64.5 (63.5 no) - but for integer results it was /much/ faster than the MG-1 The Gould 9000 supermini we bought at the same time, by comparison rated at 2000* * my notes are confusing - it might have been 2597 (single precision) from 2000 iterations. The ICL 1905E mainframe that we had 6 years earlier rated at 64.9 with the optimising compiler and about 10% better (!!!!) with the non-optimising - CCTA perhaps did too well in making the benchmark resistant to optimisation.