Oh, I was going to say that even if you meant 16 MHz (16 million hz), that doesn’t sound right. The first commonly-available 16MHz processor, so far as I know, was the Intel 80386. It made its first appearance in a personal computer in 1986, in a Compaq. I remember it well - it was the first time a clone company got ahead of the game on IBM, releasing a more powerful computer than IBM’s own. The beginning of the end of IBM’s dominance of the PC market.
The first Compaq 80386 machine was very expensive. It wasn’t until the late 80’s that machines using that processor dropped in price enough that they became relatively common in the home. The 80486 showed up in 1989, and that’s when processor speeds really started to take off. The 80486 started out as a 16 MHz chip, and by the time it was retired it was up to 100 MHz. Intel was still making them as of last year. You don’t find them in home computers, but they are still popular in embedded computers.
There were a lot of computers before these that were a lot slower. The first Vaxen were about 1 MIPS (millions of instructions per second, or Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed) which used to be the yardstick. (The VAX was defined as 1 MIPS). I’m not quite sure what that translated into as clock speed, since the VAX was a CISC machine, and different instructions took different amounts of time. However I’d better the benchmarks were defined with short, fast instructions to increase the apparent speed.
I’ll look at my LGP-21 manual tomorrow when I get to work and post the clock speed of a 1962 vintage computer. Still above 16 hz.
Sure. I used to work with a VAX 11/780 back in the day, which was the 1 MIPS machine. The VAX 1 MIPS compared to about .7 MIPS that the original 8080 could do. To get over 2 MIPS you were into an 80286 running at 12 MHz or more. Today, a Pentium Core2 Extreme processor can hit over 60,000 MIPS.
Techie nitpick… m = milli, or 1/1000; M = mega, or 1000000. They are disctict and different. One mHz is one millihertz, or one event every 1000 seconds. One MHz is one megahertz, or one million events per second. You really really don’t want your computer running at 1 mHz*.
[sub]*Unless its some battery-powered device in a ‘suspend’ mode, where the main clock is stopped and the system is ‘frozen’. This is good for saving battery power, and when you touch a key or whatever, a special circuit restarts the main clock and the rest of the computer springs back to life.[/sub]
Yes, we’ve been awaiting such capabilities with bated breath.
One possible use for higher speed processors is in the control of nano machines. They have the response time to be able to use higher speed processors. I can see a suite of nano machines that could repair a heart valve in the resting time between beats.
I’m not sure I follow. For the system to be useful, you still need to have some environment accessible to the users where they can run programs. Even if that environment doesn’t live inside the piece of hardware the user lugs around, they must still have access to it, and that’s the environment the clueless are going to screw up. How is bogging down your server space with spyware and other junk any better than bogging down your laptop with the same?
Okay, the LGP-21 (manual here ) has a four phase instruction execution cycle. On page 3-6 it says the minimum time is 18 * .4 milliseconds or 7.2 miliseconds., or 138 instructions per second. Worst case is about 8 times that, or about 17 instructions per second. This issue wasn’t clock speed, but that there was no core memory, only a disk, so access times were slow, slow, slow.
The way we do it where I work is that the applications are shared in the server - not everyone gets his or own copy. If the disk is centrally adminsitered, you’ve got one person running spyware eradication programs, and they’ll do it also. We run Solaris, so this isn’t a problem, but you can see how it would be easier to control.
I have access to the file systems. I can change my display settings, and the look and feel of my desktop, and my browser settings. I can wipe out files (but with a centralized backup this is less likely to be a disaster.) The damage I can do is fairly minimal, and fairly easy to recover from.
Ah, rats. I was going to show off by digging out the sales flyer I have for the TRS-80 (1977), but it doesn’t give the clock speed. It had a Z-80 processor, with 4k ROM and 4k RAM standard (internally expandable to 12k ROM, 16k RAM. with an expansion port that would let you go up to a whopping 62k total memory; the bulk storage device was a $50 cassette recorder).
The TRS-80 Model I had a Z-80 microprocessor chugging along at 1.77 MHz. It was actually a pretty advanced hardware stack for its time. The Apple IIe, which was a main competitor at the time, had a 65C02 processor running at 1.02 MHz.
Are you sure about that speed? I had a 8080A at 2MHz in an IMSAI; the Z80 followed, and the slowest one I recall was 4Mhz, IIRC. A pretty popular board was a S-100 “single board computer”, model “Super Six”, a 6Mhz Z80.
Yep, I’m sure. I remember it well. I had a TRS-80 for several years. I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and it agrees with me.
All those early machines were between 1 and 2 Mhz. The Apple IIe ran at about 1 Mhz - I remember it because the TRS-80 crowd did a lot of crowing about their faster clock speed. But clock speed isn’t everything - later I had a TRS-80 Color Computer, and despite the fact that it had a slower clock speed than the original TRS-80, I recall that it was significantly faster because it used a more advanced 6809 processor with an internal 16 bit addressing scheme and some 16 bit registers.
