You know you are old when...Y

[gilesgoat]

Right, it is also an on/off button, if you do not hold it down continuedly but click shortly it will go off and you have to press again turn turn it back on. Strange mouse.

"In my times mouse had only one button, occasionally 2, you had to clean the ball and often it was even attached to an RS232 port !" ah those modern things !

...and if you had to install an RS232 card, then find out a free IRQ, then use those jumpers to set the same on the card, then plug-in the mouse, install drivers and hope it all works - nowdays I just plugged the mouse in and that's it. I had to do all that and get a VGA card and SoundBlaster before I could play Lemmings on my cheap** ex-office 286* properly.

*A Mikro-Mikko made by............ Nokia!

Oh and I had to cut a hole in the case so you could plug the mouse in.

** About two month's salaries from my summer job and do not even mention the 40MB hard disk cost... Or that you had to format the HD yourself. Without the help of Indian Youtube help videos because...... THERE WAS NO INTERNET. Your internet was the local library who might have some PC-related books.

I vaguely remember having to mess with HIMEM.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT ( and/or having different versions of it to lauch different programs ) and ANY time you had to change - MUCH later, windows 95 - something about TCP/IP you had to restart the whole PC !

"Jumpers on the cards, mess until you find one working configuration" ( that did not interfere with the others ! )

When "windows" was an APP you had to launch ! Win.exe or such ..

My first 20Mbytes HD that I got from a place in Italy, did cost me something like probably 400 pounds of today money !

[zip accident]

I remember someone pointing to a big box in the lab saying something like "That's a 12 inch winchester hard drive, it has a capacity of a whole megabyte".

[tufty]

Yeah, it's mad, isn't it. Today I bought a 3mm high 1 terabyte solid state drive for 49 euros.

[tufty]

Also, you may be old if you know exactly what the error is in this without having to think too hard.

[PFVA]

When you start hating all those fireworks and other noise related things thrown on New Year's Eve. (Actually they started on Saturday)

and

when you start enjoying the silence of New Year's Day because everybody has finally run out of those by now.

[Deckard]

Most of the local firework displays were called off as 70 mph winds last night and tonight...

[Orava]

Yeah did not look good here for fireworks either, not sure if they went aheadwith them, it surely was raining hard. Much better watch the London ones on telly although you had to suffer Rich Astley crooning.

[zip accident]

I never used a Cray, but I'd heard of them:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/12/3 ... spberry-pi

The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1

Turns out, that's the Pi 1.

[tufty]

I never used a Cray, but I'd heard of them:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/12/3 ... spberry-pi

The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1

Turns out, that's the Pi 1.

Hah. Back at the tail end of the 80s, when I was working for a certain major financial institution in the city, we used to connect to a Cray on the other side of the atlantic to run some of our simulations.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/space-wars-t ... -iphone-12

a relatively current iPhone is about 10,000 times faster.

[gilesgoat]

You start to REALLY DISLIKE movies like THIS ONE READ MY REVIEW ! and you can't really stand it until the end

[gilesgoat]

I never used a Cray, but I'd heard of them:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/12/3 ... spberry-pi

The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1

Turns out, that's the Pi 1.

Hah. Back at the tail end of the 80s, when I was working for a certain major financial institution in the city, we used to connect to a Cray on the other side of the atlantic to run some of our simulations.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/space-wars-t ... -iphone-12

a relatively current iPhone is about 10,000 times faster.

My university in Trieste had a Cray Y-MP, I think now they use it as an "eye catcher" in the entrance of the new "calculus center" building.

I remember when they started to install it, I think had to be around 1994 - 1995 they had to deal with "incredible building security updates" because the USA government was "totally paranoid" about who/what/when/where people had access to Cray technology.

Of course I never managed to use it, but a friend of a friend of mine did/was able to have a login in there.

We may laugh now but in those times that was "super top tech" NOBODY could have ever predicted a thing like "the Pi" in those times, that would have been "beyond science fiction".

Yeah I think the Cray-1 among things requires 128KW of 440hz power ( standard military stuff ) some gigantic fluid compressors, can't rememeber if it used Freon or Chlorinet, basically a whole building made in a certain way by its own and I think weights a couple of tons.

One I literally sneaked behind it, when it was used as "eye catcher" in that lobby, I had a look, there's a panel with switches and OMG it's a SPAGHETTI of blue/white teflon twisted wires, like "wire wrapping at the NTH power gone COMPLETELY INSANE", it's all a mass of blue/white wires at infinity !

I read that "a good % of gates" in the Cray are used to compensate/align signal transmission delays for the wires ...

[zip accident]

I never used a Cray, but I'd heard of them:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/12/3 ... spberry-pi

The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1

Turns out, that's the Pi 1.

Hah. Back at the tail end of the 80s, when I was working for a certain major financial institution in the city, we used to connect to a Cray on the other side of the atlantic to run some of our simulations.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/space-wars-t ... -iphone-12

a relatively current iPhone is about 10,000 times faster.

The CRAY-2 was a behemoth even in its day (1985), at 5,500 pounds and taking up 16 square feet. The iPhone 12, on the other hand, weighs 5.78 ounces and occupies just 1.6 square inches.

...

The CRAY-2 operated at 1.9 billion FLOPS (floating-point operations per second)—while the iPhone 12 operates at 11 trillion FLOPS

1.6 square inches? The screen is way bigger than that, and the CPU is almost certainly smaller.

Also, Flops aren't Hz, and even then the phone has somewhat less than 11 THz of CPU and GPU operations per second.

[WiteWulf]

A little more useful (as more of us are likely to have had practical experience using one) are the comparisons of early RasPi's to Sun workstations from ~8 years ago:

https://eschatologist.net/blog/?p=266

At the time, the big thing holding back the Pi was storage throughput, and that's still somewhat the case unless you use PICe on a 5, as is network throughput (though that's improved now it's decoupled from the USB).

Also worth remembering that a large part of the engineering that went into the Cray gear wasn't about single-threaded performance or clock speed, it was about massive (for the time) parallelism and fast access to storage (both RAM and disk).

[Orava]

Back in the Uni, we the computer science students, had a lab stuffed with Sun workstations and Apple Macs when the computer engineering students had a lab with Windows 3.1 machines with some add-on software (Trumpet) to be able to access the net. How we laughed.

[WiteWulf]

Ah Trumpet Winsock, what a pile of arse that was (that *everyone* used )