Toolkit
Story: Dialogue Box 6: Attack of the 20ft blade server
Supercomputers
Interesting talk about supercomputers but I wonder if your comparisons are accurate? The Cray devices were vector processors which relied on the ability of the system to carry out numerous calculations in parallel but only if the problem (usually written in Fortran for array processing) was presented in the correct way such that the architecture was utilised properly. The AMD and intel processors are scalar processors and don't have this capability. I suspect that the Cray was faster than you are eluding when it was "on song".
Another point is that the amount of operating system code was so much smaller and more efficient in those days and you could do so much more with the power available. I was involved with mainframes in the 80's with 16mb of RAM which supported over 100 realtime users. Similarly you could run an airline reservation system on something with the power of a modern PC. Modular software has become so inefficient over the years that the power of modern processors is soaked up before the user gets to it.
Dennis
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