Sunday, February 07, 2010

Cray X-MP

ALL THIS TALK OF COMPUTERS has reminded me...

Back in "my day" (haha!) the Cray X-MP was the most powerful supercomputer in the world. NASA, as well as other branches of the US government had them, as did CERN, the particle research centre in central Europe.

I can't go into all the spec, because it worked in megahertz rather than gigahertz... and the term terrabytes (TB = 1000GB) was unheard of...

But basically, it is considerably less powerful than today's standard laptop!!

9 comments:

  1. I remember when computers were science fiction...what does that say about my age?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Okay, can't beat Puss-in-boots but in my day, the computers use little punch cards that gave us wonderful tiny pink dots that we could use for playing pranks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Did you know that the first computer was actually built at Manchester University?

    ReplyDelete
  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Manchester Uni? No!
    I dimly remember punchcards at my Dad's work...
    I was born on the cusp of the old age and the new. We had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k when I was about 12. That was the funkiest thing in home computing... apart from the Commodore 64, which I thought was better...

    ReplyDelete
  6. hope you get the computer sorted and the bailiffs very very soon :-)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Computers and bailiffs ~ don't exactly mix, do they?
    Only in my life!! :->...

    ReplyDelete
  8. I remember the first Mac. And my wife had the first one here at the lab.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Wow. I remember old Apple Macintoshes too... those distinctive square monitors...

    ReplyDelete

For legal reasons, comments that incite hatred, racism, issue threats or include personal contact information will be deleted.