[kjuhygtfrde]

I wasted most of the early 90s doing that.

We need 64 transputers to run this in real time, 1 year of PCB layout later = hey we can do this in 16 transputers and a Sparc.

Cue another year of redesign - now it would only take 4 transputers and a Sparc5.

Then a sales guy turns up promising to put the 16 transputers into an FPGA card.

Just before that works we get an i860 board for the Sparc.

Then finally we can do it in software on a Pentium...

[arethuza]

Around '94 I used a close to the top of the range (at least in CPU power) DEC Alpha workstation - which I used for running Lisp programs.

One of the other research teams in the department were working on some kind of custom chip for some specialized application and they wanted to show how much better it was than even the best commodity CPU so they gave me a chunk of completely unoptimized vanilla C to compile and run as a benchmark.

Turns out the Alpha was way faster than their chip - which I don't think they were too happy about!