> >Eh? My first job after finishing my DPhil...
>
> Your what?
It's what Oxford and a bunch of other universities call a PhD. They doctor
us differentlyin Oxford ;-)
> >was microcoding a AMD-2900 series bit slice machine which had a 25ns
> >(40MHz) clock. That was in 1983 and it was far from rocket science
> >then.
>
> A 40MHz chip in 1983? How come 40MHz personal computers
> weren't available
> until the early 1990s? Was someone keeping the technology out
> of the hands
> of the "peasants"??
Yes, really. The only thing that kept them out of the hands of the peasants
was that the peasants didn't, by and large, have enough money to buy them.
It was ever thus.
I also cheated slightly (and I'm surprised that other old-hands didn't pick
me up on it). Although the clock ticked at 40MHz, it took at least four
ticks to do anything --- just as the 4MHz Z80A did.
> >The good old 1970's Cray-1 had a 9ns (110MHz) clock if I
> remember correctly.
>
> That's a supercomputer. Those don't count. :-)
Supercomputers have been defined in many ways. One good way is that a
supercomputer is one that is too expensive for more than a few to be sold.
Paul
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