On Tuesday 30 April 2002 10:11, you wrote: A 360 you could. a 370 soon, and thats doing emulation on the bare metal a PC is faster than the total run of 360's ever built combined many times over, and that includes the I/O. when the switched fabric bus becomes the norm,, I can see things getting to the point where the differences become moot for very technical reasons like propagation delay, where the smaller you get the faster you can go, at the far end of the performance destination a large box cant go as fast, and so on. Remember this was in the line of flap about "toy computers" I have 5 of my old trs80 M1's left, and like simh xtrs emulates them far faster than you could ever have pushed the hardware even after getting em to run at 6mhz. Before that i had a pdp11/05 ( the OEM version of the 11/10) an altair and an imsai The pdp11 was part of a contraption called a co-ordiante measuring machine, i didnt want the machine, i didnt want the pdp11 that much at the time, but it came with an asr33 teleiprinter reader punch, and i wanted it for my altair and imsai. the 11/05 had 16 kwords of core, and the asr33 with its paper tape was its only I/O. The trs80's are all I have left of those days. So, lets see, Was ENIAC a toy ? One of the viewpoints was that any machine packaged with less than xxx or lacking xxx must be a toy, despite the aim of the fellow employing it. Lets crankup the dreamscape generator and take a trip. somewhat like in the movie Total Recall, have some fun making an argument in a silly way. It is in the year 2012, the end of the Myan calendar and doomsday for many modern cults, ufo nuts, and the hot monthly topic for the past 10 Years of the ArtBell radio show. You have just finished your time machine and have spent the last 4 days of your personal linear time in short trips of a day to an hour, adjusting and debugging your navigation instruments im preparation for your first trip for real. You enter the final corrections on the tiny little keyboard of a hacked pda, its all the machine anyone can have after Tom Dashels green PC clause in the energy conservation law passed after signing the koyoto treaty. One more liittle trip, and a compare to see if our travel clock tracks the control hanging on the wall, close enough to guide me to the right year, you mutter to yourself. Suddenly ! everything changes around you during your next short hop thru time, you see a blur sweep over the image of the clock you was watching do its merry spin, Pitch blackness,,, now sunlight and you find yourself on the bald prairie with nothing but grass and weeds as far as the eye can see, you are still moving,,, the sun is quite visibly moving in the sky. Something bad has happend, you look down at the timenav display and see a distortion in space time spreading from the past, the wavefront has just passed you, You reach down to the small little keyboard to command your timesled to stop. You find yourself on open grassland with a slightly gusty wind in your face. nothing but grass and weeds is seen for miles. juat as you are thinking about stepping out a low hum is heard overhead. looking up you find a small round something is decending opon you, the wind that was in your face is pushing this odd looking thing around a bit as it desends. just as you are making out some if its odd looking mechanical features comes a clearly synthethic voice with the power of a bullhorn "Halt This is a wildlands area You are in Violation of the International Socialist Decree for Sustainable Development, Halt " You freaze but now this thing is shooting at you, rod like crackling violet beams are flashing past you and hitting the grass making a pulses of noise that sound like a blowtorch, if not for the wind buffeting this droid from hell you would be dead ! You jerk your foot back into the sled as you dive your paws onto your little keyboard, your moving again. you look up and to see the horrble thing trace its descent in reverse, lets go home you say aloud, your already moving backwards in time, but again its all wrong, you have already passed the time you started and still no house. Your jaw is agape as the the days tick backwards then the years. then unfamiliar buildings are all around you. there is now the blur of people moving, but the buildings are clearly marked here and there with hanging banners with swasitkas. It dawns on you, its clear what has happened, with the invention of the stasis field generator, you not the only one who got the bright idea of turning it inside out, there must be another time machine and only the protection of your warp bubble prevented you from being erased along with everything else that went with the old reality. Just as clear to you is what to do, next stop, 1938 to lookup John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, the builders of the legendary ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania. two men obsessed with the idea of using electricity to make computing machines "think." Ridiculed and ignored by their colleagues, they found unlikely benefactors in the U.S. Army, desperate to find some way to calculate artillery shell trajectories as the Allies were getting chopped to bits attacking entrenched German positions. It was 1,000 times faster than any numerical calculator, 500 times faster than any existing computing machine. In thirty seconds, ENIAC could calculate a trajectory, something that would require twenty hours with a desk calculator, or fifteen minutes on the machine then called the Differential Analyzer. Commissioned at the beginning of the War, Mauchly and Eckert didn't finish it until the fall of 1945, too late to help in the war effort, But that was going to change, you look around at the hobby electronics on your sled, First stop, University of PA, then perhaps New Mexico and Bletchley Park. Your little toy pda has more computing power than the total that will exist on earth for a decade or three after that war. As your sled races back in time, your thinking of the best way to connect all the teliprinter terminals, whatever happened, perhaps you can restore the ballance. ------------------------------------------------- You are racing forward in time, the past 8 years filled with too many 16 hour and 24 hour days showing their toil on you, but you feel great, so far stops along the way shows everying as it should be as far as you can tell National Socialism is defeated and lives in disgrace, the berlin wall went up but came came back down on time. the bloodstain of communism stands for all to see to the lefts disgrace. things are looking better and better, perhaps your neigborhood will be there, perhaps even your house, you still cant imagine your luck could have been so good, such a subtle change as better trajectories during the war, and what was a once an errant bomb was dead on target killing the other time traveler in berlin just as he was arriving, and before he was able to alter time. With your stuff collected and riding back with you, and with John and Presper's pledge to keep the secret you are hoping that you might just find things as before. The blur of moving time slows, you are almost home ! you are in the room ! you look over and the familiar clock is spinning away in a fuzzy blur and then the pop as your warp bubble generator shuts off. you stick out yor foot.. ...... ...... Someone is calling to you, its the nurse ! How was your trip ? your eyesight clears and you remember where you are. It all comes back, those 8 years of wear and tear are gone out of your back, you stand up thanking the nurse for the best time you have had in a long while.. Near the end of a long drive home your uplift is crushed somewhat, the same condemnation signs, every where you look, Condemned, UN WildLands project. it seems the worlds victory over the left is nothing but an implanted dream. You are one of the last hangers on,,, enduring endless harrasment to get you out. "No way im gonna live in those high rise stacks of flats where they are cramming all of humanity",,, you say to yourself. You pull into your drive at the end of your deserted street, as you step out of the car you notice your front door is boarded up,,, there is a condemation sign in the yard, you hear a strangly familliar hum overhead, a horrid chill goes up your spine. "Halt This is a Wildlands area You are in Violation of the United Nations World Treaty for Sustainable Development, Halt "