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by kjs3 806 days ago
Dhrystones were pretty misleading

Yeah...always good for a laugh. Sure, your 68k can compute a Sieve of Eratosthenes 3 times faster than my 780 (or whatever)...but no 68k alive (at the time) could support 50+ interactive terminal users like we did all day every day (and provide email, netnews, ftp, etc. for the whole campus).

DEC VMS is indeed very nice, but we didn't run it. We ran a locally hacked version of BSD 4.2/4.3. At some point I got upgraded to a Sun 3/160 on my desk (well...next to it) so I hear you.

2 comments

> At some point I got upgraded to a Sun 3/160 on my desk

I was going to say that it was a nice thing to have fall into your lap, but considering that it weighed 100 kg, maybe not.

I got started with a Sun 3/50 when it was a few years old. It was slow, but surprisingly usable as an X11 development machine for C programming.

It's hilarious how today we have a variant of this same argument with desktop vs. mobile CPUs.