[_fat_santa]

Reading this I wonder, say we did have a time machine and were somehow able to give scientists back in the day access to an RPI5. What sort of crazy experiments would that have spawned?

I'm sure when the Cray 1 came out, access to it must have been very restricted and there must have been hoards of scientists clamoring to run their experiments and computations on it. What would have happened if we gave every one of those clamoring scientists an RPI5?

And yes I know this raises an interface problem of how would they even use one back in the day but lets put that to the side and assume we figured out how to make an RPI5 behave exactly like a Cray 1 and allowed scientists to use it in a productive way.

[username223]

> What sort of crazy experiments would that have spawned?

Scientists then (at least a lot of them) knew what they wanted to do, and it required faster computers rather than more of them. A lot of that Cray power at the national labs was doing fluid simulation (i.e. nuclear explosions), and with the computers they had in the 80s, it was done in one or two dimensions, relying on symmetry. Going from n^2 to n^3 grid cells was the obvious next step, but took a lot more memory and CPU speed.

[mikewarot]

First of all, how would they talk to it? You'd have to give them an RPI5 with serial console enabled, and strict instructions not to exceed the 3.3 volt limits of the I/O. Now it's reasonable that you could generate NTSC video out of it, so they could see on the screen any output.

When you then explained it was just bit-banging said NTSC output, they'd be amazed even more.

[dottedmag]

Serial port

Cray 1 was released 1975, teletypes were old tech at that time.

[Aardwolf]

Give it also an hdmi screen and usb keyboard, what more do you need to type code and see the result

[maxerickson]

Do you think they would have run experiments that have been missed in the meantime? Why?