On Oct 25, 2010, at 5:24 PM, Doug McNutt wrote:

> 
> It's the last question that makes me do this.  I had an IBM 024 punch in my 
> office that nobody else wanted because it didn't print the letters on the top 
> edge. The 026's did.  It's really fun to check a FORTRAN deck for typos when 
> all you have to look at is the holes.

Which means it ought to be about 4 times as fun to check a COBOL deck for typos.

> 
> But 3 GHz translates to a wavelength of 1/3 of a foot because the foot - a 
> metric unit now that the meter is defined in terms of the speed of light - is 
> the distance that light travels in a nanosecond.  Those clocks you're talking 
> about would be a full cycle out of phase in two inches round trip if you 
> tried that on a memory bus.
> 
> What the manufacturer really means is that you, the designer, give me 
> something slower, a few MHz, on a pin and I'll multiply it up to a 3 GHz 
> clock that stays wholly inside the microprocessor. There we're dealing with 
> much shorter path lengths.
> 
> The time delay in a wave guide is still limited by the speed of light. Bigger 
> and longer doesn't get better.


The time delay in a wave guide is limited by the speed of light.  The time 
delay in a wire is limited by the propagation velocity which is slower, often 
around 2/3 C.

Clark Martin
Redwood City, CA, USA
Macintosh / Internet Consulting

"I'm a designated driver on the Information Super Highway"

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