While searching for something else, I ran across a binder with a “Welcome to our local computing services” document I’d developed for our new users at the Denver office … back in May 1996. My favorite part:
DEN11 is the Novell NetWare network here at the Broadway office. Physically, it is an Everex Cube 486/33 with 64Mb RAM and 8Gb of disk storage, running Novell NetWare 4.1. PCs and other peripherals are connected into the LAN thorugh an Ethernet (10-BaseT) wiring system.
I think Katherine’s Leapster has more computing power than our LAN did a decade ago. Certainly it has a better user interface …
92 view(s)
Heh. I’ve often thought about how far computer power has come in the last few years. Compare the Leapster to the IBM 4341 we had at Pomona (what was the clock speed on the 4341?)! Heck, I bet your Treo has about as much computing power as the 4341!
Dave?
My CoH Box at home has more power and storage then the entire Computervision network I worked on when I started at the flats….at least ten times the storage and power.
That was a million Dollar system back in the day.
The IBM 4341 …
An IBM 4341 with two million characters of main storage offers a lower purchase price and an instruction execution speed up to 3.2 times that of a System/370 Model 138 with one million characters.
The processor is available in two models: in two-million- and four-million-character versions.
Ooooh. Not sure if we have the 2Mb or 4Mb version …
Given that I have a flash drive that hangs off my keychain and has 512x the RAM …
Both models use the IBM 3278 Model 2A display console, with a 1,920-character display and keyboard, for operation and maintenance. Up to three additional consoles and/or 3287 printers (for a total of four devices) can be attached to the 4341.
We have three computers and one printer currently hooked up to our home network.
The new processor uses high-density logic chips with up to 704 circuits, allowing electrical signals to be switched at three billionths of a second, and memory chips that can store 64,000 bits of information.
A PIII Xeon chip (vintage 10/1999) has a 256K cache. It has 28 million transistors on it.
Released on the same day, to go with the 4341:
IBM 3370 direct access storage for both the 4331 and 4341 offers more than twice the recording density of previous IBM disk storage devices. It can store up to 571 million characters of information, operating at a data transfer rate of 1.859 million characters per second. It features a head manufactured by a semiconductor process. Up to 32 3370s can be attached to a storage control facility, which, in turn, can be channel-attached to the 4341 Processor.
So you can mount up to 18Gb to the beast. Wow …
I recall hearing that the 4341 at Pomona had 4MB of memory.
The specs you quoted didn’t really say what the speed of the processor was. The web page http://www.jcmit.com/cpu-performance.htm claims that the 4341 clock speed was just 8.33 MHz!
That same web page also suggests that the 4341 cost about $385,000.
The computer power we now take for granted is absolutely amazing when compared to the computer power available just a few years ago.
Yes, indeed.