9370 is a dog! Was: Re: Re[2]: Firsts - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

5 Feb 1998

At 09:48 05-02-98 -0500, William Donzelli &lt;william(a)ans.net&gt; wrote:

...
 > Sounds about right. 11A at 230V is 2.5 kVA, which
will do 1.8kW at 0.7 power 
...
 > factor (typical for a rectified mains power
supply) with ease.
> 
>> Still dumped alotta heat! :-) We got cheap electricity in this town.$0.036

...
    per KWH vs. about $0.08 or more per KWH outside of the
area.  
 Even $0.08 is less than we pay (typically $0.11).  But we can get dual 
 tariff systems which charge us the same peak rate and less than half 
 that off-peak for heating etc.  But I digress. 
This sounds like a perfect time to get on my soapbox concerning big
computers and electricity!

Lets say you have this wonderful IBM mainframe and wish to use it. When
you add up all of the DASDs, maybe a terminal or two, perhaps you end up
with a 3 kW system. Now run that value thru your electric bill. I think
that you will find that a night of hacking on your system will cost less
than a ticket to a movie! 
Certainly more _fun_ than some of the films that have been released for
sure! The wife will not agree though. But if one of us had a large old
S/360 or S/370 in our basements, the power consumption would financially
kill us (because of the water chillers for cooling, current consumption of
older technology electronics, etc.)  I'd love to even _see_ a large S/360
and all its utilities.

...

And I must admit that I am suprised that the CPU sucks so much. I suppose
if some of the memory was taken out, it would be quite a bit less. My
Sun-4/280 draws a hell of a bunch, but it has 32 megs of 41256 DRAMS,
each one sucking a little bit. Just removing 24 megs from it drops the
power consumption greatly. 
Only one 8 Meg board installed. Maximum, IIRC, was 16 Mb storage. DASD was
probably used as workstation storage. Philip, can you confirm any of this
...
 from your sales literature? If you're interested,
William, I can give you the lineup of PC board modules in the CPU which I briefly
talked about
earlier in the thread.

- Chris
-- --

=======================================================
Christian Fandt         Phone: +716-661-1832  -Office
ACU-RITE INC.                    +716-488-1722  -Home
One Precision Way      Fax: +716-661-1888  -Office fax
Jamestown, New York
14701-9699   USA          email:  cfandt(a)servtech.com