In fact, the latter was faster than a Pentium 75MHz for anything that didn't require the FPU.

Or external bus access. A Pentium 90 could comfortably play Quake; an Am5x86/133 could not, because it only had a 32-bit external bus. Pentiums had a 64-bit external bus.

But none of those come close to the performance of COBOL for these specific tasks.

I'd actually like to know if this has ever really been put to the test.

The application on which we run our business was written in a language that is obviously a descendant of COBOL, and one of the reports it generates takes multiple hours to run. One day, I thought I'd try an experiment and, after messing around for an hour or two, I had a sed/awk pipeline that produced exactly the same results in about 10 minutes - and part of that time was used to convert the language's data files to text that sed and awk could understand.

It would be interesting to see how much COBOL code could be replaced in a similar way.

Why would BMW lower their prices when they have a complete monopoly?

The only cars you can buy in Australia are BMWs? I'm not sure I believe that.

You could try reading my post

Sorry, I guess lost some clarity, by going for dramatic effect. I basically meant to say: "it sure would be a lot easier if all storage used the same units." It's pretty annoying when 1TB of memory doesn't fit into 1TB of disk.

They are profiteering. No more, no less.

Oh, stop. I've got no love for Microsoft, but in this case, I have to agree with them. It's not like we're talking about selling food and water for an inflated price after a disaster. It's just software. If you don't like the price, don't buy it.

There are plenty of other options. Use Linux. Write your own. Whatever. If people had started doing that ten years ago, when Linux started becoming a little more popular, Linux would be an entirely acceptable alternative, by now, and neither Microsoft nor Apple would be in a position to do any "price gouging." Instead, people complain that it's too hard, and then whine when companies take advantage of them. Sorry, but you won't get any sympathy from me.

How can BMW sell a car for $350,000 in Australia when the same model is $100,000 in the UK.

I'm not sure I understand what your problem is. If the price is too high, don't buy the car. If everyone did that, BMW would have no choice but to lower the price, if they want to continue to sell cars in Australia.

Frankly I think OSes need to get with it and just start using base 10 prefixes for drive space.

I'll agree with you when you can tell me how to install exactly 1,000,000,000 bytes of memory in my computer - no more, no less.

All else, such as file sizes, card, tape or disk storage

I honestly don't know what you're talking about, here. My computer knowledge goes back to the 70s, and I don't remember anyone expressing storage in base 10 units (outside of sales and marketing), until the early 90s. I always assumed "they" (the people who changed everything) meant "hard drive manufacturers".

One thing I'll add: I have to ask if your education was mostly on IBM machines. From what I remember, they couldn't do anything in the "standard" way. They broke the delete and ctrl keys, when they came out with the PC, and they produced AIX, for example.

You would think they'd take an example from NeWS. Then again, it's likely that no one currently working on Gnome is old enough to remember it.

I do hope you got to review the patches?

Of course not. It's closed-source software.

Thankfully, they were only reading the file. Why they were locking it, in the first place, I'll never know.

You get some pretty interesting problems, when you increase the number of cores in your computer.

A couple of years ago, we replaced a 4-core IBM P5 with a 32-core HP DL 580. We tested it for a couple of months with just a user, or two, at a time. Then, we took a day and tested with the entire company (roughly 250 users). Thank goodness we did before we put it into production because, for some people, it was actually slower than the P5. It looked like it was going to be a disaster.

Fortunately, I had seen this problem before (on a Sequent Symmetry, of all things). I ran "strace" on the offending process, and sure enough, we were having problems with lock contention. We talked to our software vendor and, while it took a while for them to admit it was their problem (and probably cost us multiple thousands of dollars to have them fix it), they rewrote the code to use fewer locks. Problem solved.

Space 1999 was good when I was a kid, but when I re-watched it as an adult I found it terrible -- the show needed better writing

We could list that kind of series all day. The original battlestar galactica... Buck Rogers... The A team...

Yeah, but Battlestar Galactica had some decent episodes, even if some of the stories were stolen from movies. Space: 1999 (and Buck Rogers) redefined bad television. I've been re-watching it on DVDs from Netflix, and I'm up to the episode entitled "One Moment of Humanity". I have to say, it was possibly the worst hour of television ever produced. The "Star Wars Christmas Special" was better.

I'm up to the "Those of you who watched when it originally aired probably remember having nightmares after the "Dragon's Domain" episode (I certainly do), but so far, that's the best one I've seen. "Mission of the Darians" was tolerable, too.

Heck, I'd be happy modern windowing systems were better at handling the taskbar on the side on the screen, instead of on the top or bottom.

i486 introduced the CMPXCHG

They only introduced it on the 486? How did they do things like file locking and multi-processor synchronization on earlier architectures, without an instruction like that?

I have a US Robotics modem

My 1200 baud modem is US Robotics. I took it apart one time and found it actually has two (6502) processors. I wonder if they use one for each direction, or one for the command processing, and one for the data.