mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (09/20/87)
Peter Merchant (merchant@dartvax.UUCP) writes: >The argument goes that why do students need 80286 personal computers? >8086/8088 based systems are certainly powerful enough for the things they'll >have to do. Personally, I've been saying they should get 80286 or 80386 based >machines. But that's just me. >Why do these clueless people need 80386 power? Because they are clueless! All I know is that MY students need something better than a poor 8088/8087. The program I'm giving them for a class assignment takes about 2 to 7 seconds to generate a single graph. This needs to be repeated at least 100 times for them to get a good look at what is happening. This obviously takes several minutes. (The program illustrates the generation of motion in quamtum mechanics by the summation of series. It takes about 15000 additions and multiplications to generate a frame. I tried using longs instead of floats and it didn't help. Ints don't have enough precision.) I need about a factor of ten more speed, which I can get on my PDP-11, or hopefully with a 80387. I'm waiting for a Cray on every desk; then I'll really be able to use a computer for teaching! Doug McDonald (mcdonald@uiucuxe) Department of Chemistry University of Illinois