I'm enjoying the article so far, and I'm sure contributors will chime in who are far more knowledgeable than I. But the first thing I notice is that he spends some time estimating how inferior the early 7090 was to a modern laptop in terms of clock speed, RAM, and tape-driven I/O, and concludes "So now the 7090 looks to have run at about a quadrillionth (10-15) the speed of your 2021 laptop." The first thing that leaps out at me is that he appears to be multiplying the three comparative numbers to come up with a quadrillion. But that isn't the proper way to compare speeds, is it? Surely the proper comparison is only the slowest of the three.
Not to mention the silly typographical error of writing 10 to the 15th as "10-15". I use "10e15", myself, though I suppose in a magazine with decent capabilities a superscript might look more professional. This article, though, isn't comparing modern PCs to modern mainframes, so no need to wax indignant. --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* If you can't say something nice, say it in Yiddish. */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Tom Brennan Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2021 01:26 I don't know what's going on with the comparisons lately, but here's a fun one. Paging the fact checkers... https://spectrum.ieee.org/ibm-mainframe ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
