[ggm]

I'd forgotten how close to printing machines the old photocopiers were. You would basically either have a crap one you could operate yourself, or take your stuff to the printery to have professionals (a subset of librarians I think, or the logical join over librarians and computer operations staff) do it for you. Printing machines had a fleet of maintainers, craft unions who walked off the job if you touched a dial.

They were amazing at doing things which really mattered: shrinking an A0 architectural drawing down but maintaining aspect ratio. Adjusting offsets for the print for binding signatures, so the 1st and 16th page was not too far out because of wrapping around the other 8 pairs of pages. Even just working out how to rotate the pages for N-up printing. But the GUI sucked. I think they called ours "the bindery" because it's main gig was doing PHD from soup to nuts, binding included.

The repair techs had the most amazing flight cases, packed with tools which served one specific purpose.Like, A doohickey to adjust the corona wire, without dismantling the imaging and toner roller, with a tonne of equipment hovering over your head on a gas-lift. Screwdrivers with very very carefully chosen lengths. Torque wrenches. It was high tech meets motor racing meets.. IBM.

I am told they were paid better than many computer techs. The IBM guy was paid IBM scale to fix it on IBMs timescales. the xerox guy did more random shit, with more devices, more often.

They had a very corporate look. that amazing briefcase or six. Suit, tie. Very acceptable.

I know a guy who worked for a paper-folding-and-envelope-stuffing company and it was very similar culturally: can-do, fix anything, but working on giant multi-million dollar machines which were used twice a year to do tax mailouts, and election materials, and the rest of the time rented to the original spam merchants for 10c per thousand mailouts. The secondhand value of these machines were like photocopiers: Really significant. He was brought out of retirement to help take one apart into TEU equivalent chunks to be shipped to Singapore from Brisbane. His retirement gig at one point was repairing Espresso machines, he said it made him feel familiar and useful.

The era which was the end of the typing pool was fascinating. All kinds of arcane roles which only make sense in the absence of email and tiny printers everywhere. Some of those jobs had been there from the days of hand-copying, Dickens-era and before.

[Taniwha]

Back in my mainframe days (late 70s) we ran a large mainframe, the only one in the local uni - way slower than your phone, a couple of Mb of core, ran payroll and 30 terminals. We had a dedicated local engineer who had his own onsite office. In the south of NZ we were a really long long way away from his home office in the US, he was expected to be able to fix anything, and mostly he could.

But one time the machine started writing crap on random things - screens, printers, worst of all disks - could take a day or to to recover after it scribbled across the equivalent of the root file system (giant head-per-track coffee table sized platters). The poor engineers couldn't figure it out, it happened so in frequently eventually they flew a guy out from head office in the US - he came with a wooden stick - he ran it down a card cagore in the IO process, nothing happened, he tried the next row bang! it crashed, after we were back up he continued with his wooden stick doing a binary search for the source, eventually he pulled a card and 3 little solder balls fell into his hand, they'd been sitting there loose against IC pins since it was installed

As you point out sometimes it just takes having the correct tool and knowing how to use it

[dmd]

> way slower than your phone

For the young'uns... I think you're underselling this a bit. A really powerful late 70s mainframe, generously would have been somewhere around 1 to 2 million instructions per second.

Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster.

[brk]

True, but 90% of the mainframe instructions weren't tracking, telematics, data exfiltration, and user profiling. So it kinda evens out.

[The_Colonel]

> Your phone is probably on the order of 5-10 trillion instructions per second. That's a million times faster.

Do you mean from iGPU? The fastest smartphone iGPU I found is MediaTek 9300 which has 2.4 TFLOPS which roughly corresponds to your claim. Cray-1 (1975) had 160 MFLOPS which would make today's high-end smartphone 15 000 times faster than Cray-1.

[Jtsummers]

Cray-1 wasn't a mainframe, it was a supercomputer. As such it was designed to push the performance envelope in a way mainframes (of the time, but even today) weren't even trying for. Mainframes were designed for transaction processing and reliability. They were substantially slower than contemporary supercomputers.

[The_Colonel]

That's true, but supercomputers are somewhat conceptually similar to GPUs, so it seems like a better comparison to illustrate technological progress. Comparing mainframes and GPUs is comparing apples and oranges.

[zifpanachr23]

This is a good analogy. If you look at a modern mainframe CPU it becomes pretty clear where the differences lie. Fewer, beefier cores with a lot of focus on cache.

Supercomputers tend to use more conventional cores, but way more of them, and connect them in a large fabric. There's a lot more focus on parallelization and horizontal scaling.

Mainframe overall compute is nowhere near a supercomputer, and you probably shouldn't be running a massive physics simulation on a mainframe, but you may get more consistency and reliability for well defined tasks.

[vaxman]

This table will help you, but it stops way back in 2021 at 346,350 MIPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second

Looking forward to the Apple A18 Pro reported to be 4GHz x2 and 2GHz x2 +/- thermal conditions.

[Taniwha]

Yes exactly, core cycle times were ~1uS so around 1Mhz clock for our old B6700

[kragen]

your phone is 5–10 billion instructions per second, a thousand times faster. it's probably a quad-core in-order arm running at 1–2 gigahertz, not 1–2 terahertz

[dmd]

Instructions and hertz have not been equivalent for almost a quarter of a century now, though.

[kragen]

not equivalent, but close enough in this case; even my laptop only manages less than 2 ipc per core, and the error in your earlier comment is a factor of 1000

[vaxman]

I think we need to put it in terms of smart watches now, soon smart rings.

Hope we remaining masters can stop the delusional tech bastards running around convinced they're a new and more powerful Steve Jobs (oblivious that his success came from leveraging microprocessors to put millions of formally educated tech people with families out of work in a disorderly manner by disrupting the market) from further inflating the public stock markets (again) and distorting energy capX over AI hype. AWernerS is clearly losing the battle against them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixe8Snxu3wo

[bruce511]

We still have an old printing machine. It came as part of an acquisition and took a truck to move. We rent a small unit in an industrial complex to house it.

Nobody knows how old it is. It predated the folk who came with it (all of whom were close to retirement.)

It's still running (looked after by one of the retirees on a part time basis.) He does print runs a couple times a week. To seem him with an oil can in his hands is to step back in time.

It's more or less neutral profit-wise, but pays his wage and keeps some old customers happy. When he gives up the machine goes too (likely for scrap I guess).

[actionfromafar]

Beautiful little story. I love when such things are allowed to exist.