[amelius]

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

However, I do believe that astronomers put references to the actual instruments they used in their publications.

[xmcqdpt2]

So do most algorithms papers that have benchmarks in them. It's not always useful though, because information about how this algorithm compares to some other one on a PDP-10 doesn't necessarily translate to modern machines.