Steele: I scribbled calculations on the back of an envelope. Okay, suppose you did the arithmetic bit serially, like the PDP-8S? A 32-bit floating-point multiply you have to multiply two 24-bit significands, that's going to take 600 time steps. For the additions, a logarithmic number of shifts, each will take 24 time steps...It turned out that a floating-point add would take about 1/2 a millisecond and a multiply a millisecond. Sounds terrible, but you've got 64,000 processors.
Dr Dobb's Journal: So you could do 64,000 of these calculations in a millisecond.
Steele: That's up in the range of 100 million operations a second, equivalent to a Cray 1, which was the supercomputer of the day. So after the lecture, I went up to Danny and said, "You said this is a terrible numeric machine, but I can tell it's approximately the equivalent of a Cray 1." And he replied, "Can we have dinner tonight?"
Yes, Steele is quite a character. I've been starting to get quite interested in Fortress as a language. I am thinking of becoming an active participant.
When I was studying for my PhD in Edinburgh around 1990/91, the group I was working with (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre) bought a Connection Machine. Alas it was just being set up when I finished, so I never spent any time on it. So Thinking Machines had at least one customer!
Not so.
From Dr. Dobb's interview with Guy Steele (http://www.ddj.com/java/184406029;jsessionid=S1LAIUWHYHNYGQS...):
Steele: I scribbled calculations on the back of an envelope. Okay, suppose you did the arithmetic bit serially, like the PDP-8S? A 32-bit floating-point multiply you have to multiply two 24-bit significands, that's going to take 600 time steps. For the additions, a logarithmic number of shifts, each will take 24 time steps...It turned out that a floating-point add would take about 1/2 a millisecond and a multiply a millisecond. Sounds terrible, but you've got 64,000 processors.
Dr Dobb's Journal: So you could do 64,000 of these calculations in a millisecond.
Steele: That's up in the range of 100 million operations a second, equivalent to a Cray 1, which was the supercomputer of the day. So after the lecture, I went up to Danny and said, "You said this is a terrible numeric machine, but I can tell it's approximately the equivalent of a Cray 1." And he replied, "Can we have dinner tonight?"