jet@karazm.math.uh.edu (J. Eric Townsend) (02/21/90)
In article <20635@netnews.upenn.edu> bradley@grip.cis.upenn.edu (John Bradley) writes: >Yes, but has anybody actually PLAYED with these things? I attended the >Philadelphia unveiling and got to try out a 320, a 530, and an X terminal. (This was on the smallest deskside unit, with 40Mb of ram.) First off, at the Houston show, nobody was allowed to *touch* the things, much less get at the keyboard. Monday, we (some folks at UH) went over to IBM to actually get a personal demo. They were rather upset that we had a 1/4" tape with source, ready to try out. emacs wouldn't compile. :-) The C compiler was barfing on stray interrupts and never got through a single .c file, so it had little to do with bad karma from compiling RMS code on an IBM. :-P (We couldn't run the X terminal and the console in X at the same time, because some IBM person didn't allocate enough pty's... :-) The fortran compiler didn't have the normal unix f77 libs -- all we wanted was dtime() so that our benchmarking programs would work. After some quick mucking around on a vt100 clone (the big monitors *still* aren't in whatever AIX uses for a termcap, so vi is useless from a non-X or non-dumb terminal environ), we hacked our .f code to not call dtime. Instead, we used /bin/time and did single runs. We saw between 5 and 5.2 MFLOPS doing fluid dynamics code (gaussian elimination, matrix multiplies, big data sets, etc); and about 1/4 - 1/5 the speed of an ETA-10P on some code written for the Cray and ETA. (Sorry, we don't know what the MFLOPS on our ETA code is, the ETA is our benchmark for that code. :-) Oh well. Maybe the code IBM ships will be in better condition. -- J. Eric Townsend University of Houston Dept. of Mathematics (713) 749-2120 jet@karazm.math.uh.edu Skate UNIX(tm).
buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck) (02/22/90)
In article <1990Feb21.073230.11534@lavaca.uh.edu>, jet@karazm.math.uh.edu (J. Eric Townsend) writes: > In article <20635@netnews.upenn.edu> bradley@grip.cis.upenn.edu (John Bradley) writes: > >Yes, but has anybody actually PLAYED with these things? I attended the > >Philadelphia unveiling and got to try out a 320, a 530, and an X terminal. > > First off, at the Houston show, nobody was allowed to *touch* the > things, much less get at the keyboard. I got to touch one at the Houston announcement. The Ingres guy let me play around a bit. Unfortunately, I crashed their system just doing some ls's and cd's. :-( They were rebooting for more than five minutes, but they weren't particularly mad. I really can't complain, since they told me this was an alpha release of AIX 3.0 and an alpha release of Ingress. But here was the _bizarre_ part. I caught the tail end of the technical announcement in a large auditorium, spent some time in the demo room, and then went looking for the next announcement cycle, pitched for "commercial" customers. I tried to get in one of the closed doors, but an IBM lady said "You can't go in there because of the lights." I start to open another door, but some really weird sounds are coming from inside. The room is pitch black, rock music is blaring, people are packed standing room only, a smoke machine is pumping out clouds over the audience, and there is some laser light show being displayed on the front curtains. As a guy next to me said, "I don't know whether to sit down or ask someone to dance!" I was repelled by this show and left without even waiting for the presentation. I was told this show lasted something like ten minutes. Sorry, I came in the middle of a work day to get product information, not to waste time at some mobile disco. This was the most unprofessional display I have ever experienced from IBM. Did IBM inflict this dog and pony show on the entire country, or were we in Houston just "lucky?" But the machines themselves seem quite impressive at first look. -- A. Lester Buck buck@siswat.lonestar.org ...!texbell!moray!siswat!buck
jet@karazm.math.uh.edu (J. Eric Townsend) (02/23/90)
In article <504@siswat.UUCP> buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck) writes: >"You can't go in there because of the lights." I start to open another door, >but some really weird sounds are coming from inside. The room is pitch >black, rock music is blaring, people are packed standing room only, a smoke >machine is pumping out clouds over the audience, and there is some laser >light show being displayed on the front curtains. As a guy next to me said, >"I don't know whether to sit down or ask someone to dance!" I was repelled >by this show and left without even waiting for the presentation. I was told >this show lasted something like ten minutes. Sorry, I came in the middle of >a work day to get product information, not to waste time at some mobile >disco. This was the most unprofessional display I have ever experienced >from IBM. Did IBM inflict this dog and pony show on the entire country, or >were we in Houston just "lucky?" They did this in the morning as well, but with no smoke. I didn't mind too much, except the music was *horribly* produced. Cuts were not on time, beats were wrong, and levels were off in who knows where. The "laser show" consisted of a few squiggles on a screen. It was far to dark for us to eat the free lunches for which IBM must have paid at least least $1.50 apiece. Oh well. I was amused, but that was about it. -- J. Eric Townsend University of Houston Dept. of Mathematics (713) 749-2120 jet@karazm.math.uh.edu Skate UNIX(tm).