Mad-Men: 7.06 "The Strategy" (open spoilers)

[ThelmaLou]

@Shalmanese

In fact, the slowest microchip I could find, the ATiny4, used in remote controls and battery voltage regulators among other things, purchasable for 40 cents each wholesale, is still 8 times faster than the IBM 360/50.

Not to mention memory, what with 32G flash drives and all, for Pete’s sake. Not that Pete.

[Labrador_Deceiver]

@ftg

Maybe they should have added a scene in this episode showing Peggy and a flunky doing marketing research in a parking lot of a Burger Chef. You know, for realism.

Way to miss the point.

[Quimby]

Just using this thread to remind people that unlike most shows, Mad Men didn’t take the holiday weekend off. The finale for this half of the season is tonight.

[Lantern]

@Shalmanese

There’s no probably about it. The IBM 360/50 operated at roughly 150K operations/second. The latest Apple A7 system on a chip is capable of about 150 billion operations/second, between the CPU and GPU. Meaning the $800 iPhone 5s in your pocket is about a million times faster than the $15M machine you see in Mad Men.

I knew I was being over-cautious with that “probably”. So I guess that means that even cellphones from say 15 years back would have been more powerful than the 360 ?

[Shalmanese]

@Lantern

I knew I was being over-cautious with that “probably”. So I guess that means that even cellphones from say 15 years back would have been more powerful than the 360 ?

The ubiquitous Nokia 3210 phone, released in 1999 had a 13 Mhz processor in it, making it roughly 8x as fast as the IBM 360/50. Meaning, if you had $100M in the 1960s, you could lash together a cluster of IBM 360’s… and play a game of snake.