[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!