Re: Perspective
@jake:
"Probably took a full minute to decompress with the VAX ... Things sure have changed."
In uni in the late 80's we had an 11/780 in the lab. During the course of a lecture in public/private keys, the lecturer set us a challenge to find the factors of R11 (i.e. 11111111111). I set an overnight brute force batch job going on the Vax at lowish priority in the unlikely event anybody would get annoyed. After around 6-7 hours processing time it spat out the answers and I was £5 to the better (a good night in the pub back in the day)
Out of curiousity about 10 years ago I was playing around with multi-threading on a very bog standard Dell desktop and decided to see what effect multiple cores would have. Tried single threaded first to to make sure I'd gotten it right. Answer back immediately. Can't be right thought I. Checked it, it was right, the factorisation had taken approx 10ms.
In retrospect, looking at the number written out it shouldn't have been a surprise, but I still think it's a fine example of the advances over a 20-25 year period.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
