[Info-vax] What does VMS get used for, these days?

[Scott Dorsey]

John Forkosh  <forkosh at panix.com> wrote:
>
>Comparisons over time are goofy. I started programming in the spring
>of 1966, with my first job as operator/programmer (putting myself
>through undergrad school) in the fall of 1966. At that time there
>were ~35,000 computers worldwide, and to say half a mip each would be
>generous. So my one little i7 desktop has somewhat more than twice the
>processing power that existed on the entire planet Earth at that time.
>And disk, memory comparisons are pretty much similar. Moore's law at work.

It's not so much that computers have become more powerful, although as
you point out they have.  It's that computers have become so cheap that 
computer time has become cheap.  Everybody has a CPU, many of them have
dozens, or hundreds, or thousands on their desk, so they don't have to
beg or wait for computer time.

Unfortunately as computer time has become cheap, programmer time has
become more expensive.

I remember doing a project on simple ionospheric modelling and having to
steal computer time from a local bank.  I got the operators to run my
job on their 360/50 during third shift without anyone noticing.  The 
limitation wasn't how slow the computer was (and god was it slow doing
floats) but getting access to it at all.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."