I really wish Gary could appreciate now just how much love and respect we have for him for his contributions to the IT industry. He seems to bring such a warmness to these formal earlier episodes before the consumer revolution took off through the 90s.
For those that don't know . . . This computer had 2gb storage . . . 64 bit words is 8 bytes (250 mil of them) . . . The snapdragon in my phone hits close to 2000000 mflops (vs 250 mflops) on the GPU and around 250000 mflops on the CPU (~2 tflops GPU and ~250 gflops CPU). All packaged in a fraction of a fraction of the size of the cray
actually 40 trillion bits (5tb)..LOL!!! My Samsung s10 plus has 1.5tb worth of storage. What we have now was unthinkable back then the same way what we had then was unthinkable during the 50's.
Any other millennial devs watching this and marveling at technical accomplishments that happened right before our time? It is making me appreciate my modern hardware even more than I already do.
IT student here-I've watched many of the episodes from the 80's. It's fascinating to hear Microsoft being barely mentioned, that it's mostly about IBM with some Apple machines. Or machines which run Unix
"The CRAY-2 operated at 1.9 billion FLOPS (floating-point operations per second)-while the iPhone 12 operates at 11 trillion FLOPS. " -- I pulled that off of PC magazine's site. That's just crazy
dont you guys feel stupid knowing that all you do with your computers that are twice the power that NASA has hoped to get by the end of 1987 is watching youtube and playing games? Think what NASA would've done if they had the computing power of your laptop 40 years ago.
Most people don’t use their computers or devices: they’re just content consumers. Engineers, programmers, and scientists actually use the damn things. I think if they magically had the super computing power of today back in the 60s-80s we would have had so many more breakthroughs. Mostly because the Cold War was going on and the funding was massive for all kinds of science and engineering. Today to get something done you have convince a moron CEO with an MBA to give you a tenth of what you need by dangling the promise of even more money in front of them. It should be embarrassing… the gulf between what we could do and what we actually bother to do these days.
Most people don’t use their computers or devices: they’re just content consumers. Engineers, programmers, and scientists actually use the damn things. I think if they magically had the super computing power of today back in the 60s-80s we would have had so many more breakthroughs. Mostly because the Cold War was going on and the funding was massive for all kinds of science and engineering. Today to get something done you have convince a moron CEO with an MBA to give you a tenth of what you need by dangling the promise of even more money in front of them. It should be embarrassing… the gulf between what we could do and what we actually bother to do these days.
Most people don’t use their computers or devices: they’re just content consumers. Engineers, programmers, and scientists actually use the damn things. I think if they magically had the super computing power of today back in the 60s-80s we would have had so many more breakthroughs. Mostly because the Cold War was going on and the funding was massive for all kinds of science and engineering. Today to get something done you have convince a moron CEO with an MBA to give you a tenth of what you need by dangling the promise of even more money in front of them. It should be embarrassing… the gulf between what we could do and what we actually bother to do these days.
@@RonJohn63 thats why Concorde eventually went out of service. They were subsidized by the government and still lost money on the flights which tens of thousands of dollars.
Yes there is but not for the civilians. The Project Aurora that started in the mid-80s was a success but it was deemed too sophisticated for civilian use even for today. It is the hypersonic spy plane that will be called SR-72 once it enters service. There will also be an advanced bomber version of that plane.
I love the sponsorship adverts at the end, saying that their computers come with the 1200 baud modem! Wow, a whole 0.12Kb a second.. I worked out that it would take somewhere in the region of of 2 years 9 months to download a half hour high definition video. Or around 7 years for a high-definition movie. But even in 87 that seems a bit behind the times, because my first modem in the early 80s was a 300 baud modem, and then an 800 board modem, and I was using a 1200 baud modem by 85-86. By the early 90s I had a 19k2baud, and I believe that I was one of the first people that I knew to have a 56k bis standard modem by 95. After that it just went crazy, when we had our first fibre optic installed in 99 here in the UK, which allowed us to have the earliest 'broadband' (at least, that's what they call it!) with a whopping 256k!! So in the space of just a little over 10-years, it went from 1200 baud, to broadband in its earliest form at around 256k. After that it just took off, with 512, and then one megabit, etc and so on.. right up to today, where we have 250mbit from Virgin broadband, with routers here. And just recently they've written to me saying that they're going to be rolling out their first gigabit routers in the near future. No more waiting 20 minutes for a picture to form on the screen lol.
Boy thats when you had to like the picture you downloaded because it would take another half hour to download another one and by then the wife would be home! Hahahah
My first modem was 2400 on amiga..there was no internet then ..it was BBS...and when i first registraded on one ..i played football in the street and mom call me that i have phone call...and it was owner off that BBS who then chat with me to see who i am
Hello from 3 years on and the US and China have computers that can do 1 Quintillion calculations per second, totally insane , the Supercomputer of 87 was like a modern i7 cpu nothing special lol
@@ducksonplays4190 want proof run cinebench r20 on that cray computer and tell me how long it took it to complete the test? I am guessing 20 years my systems score is 22649 on the first run what does the cray get?
you can do the show with new people, just keep the same format and the same style of the show. it was great. that show and The Mechanical Universe, were 2 shows that I use to love watching.
nahhh.. the more you fly, the more free flights you get, just accumulate those frequent flyer miles. plus, they can use Skype face-time or a dozen other web conferencing technology to save a trip.
If your desktop is based on one of the latest AMD Ryzen processors, it might be way more powerful than the supercomputers in 1987. Take for example today's AMD based XBox Series X. It is just a game console but it already is capable of 12.15 Teraflops (12.15 Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second) With today's desktop gaming computers, there are GPUs that are capable of 25 Teraflops or greater depending on the model. The supercomputer mentioned above is only capable of from 250 Megaflops (Million Floating Point Operations Per Second) with boost up to 1.7 Gigaflops (Billion Floating Point Operations Per Second). They had a plan to upgrade it to enable up to 10 Gigaflops or 10 Billion floating point operations per second. It has a memory of 250 Megabytes, while today's desktop has 8, 16, 32, Gigabytes or even greater.
@@jsmythib oh I see, sorry for my ignorance that was inexcusable of me. We have just entered here in Wales another full lockdown, so I will have to look for ways to stop myself from, as you say "going postal".
graphene is a room temperature superconductor however it still can't do quantum processing at room temperature you can really create a fast transistor out of it that does digital logic either but in the future you might be able to do photonic computation with it.
how many layer where they back then cause intel has reduced the layers in their newer chips for better heat dissipation to get more speed out of them just goes to show how things change over the years with chip designs
What was briefly mentioned in the Random Access news section of The Computer Chronicles was that some people in the computer industry thought that desktop computer systems could someday be on par with the super computers of the 1980s, well just thirty years later this prediction has practically come true for the most part.
Our modern day smartphones have orders of magnitude more computational power than the super computers from the 1980s. Crazy how much and fast technology advances.
@@GaryCameron Cray 2 in this video had about 2GB RAM and 1.6 Gflops of processing power. it must of had massively parallel ALUs in SIMD. That is still more powerful than most laptops today. Impressive for 1987.
Wow, everyone in comments pointing out that their home computers are way more powerful, great, but what do you do with them? Watch funny cat videos and play games? Really useful...
I'm sure he did much more for the episode and probably recorded more than one episode per session. He had a lot of flying to do and business deals to ruin lol
I believe it was mentioned he had some exotic car, a lambo or ferrari or something of that nature, which he took out for the weekend drive to do the filming. So he didn't mind the trip.
I love how "Spelling Correction" was such a huge feature in that Leading Edge ad... Today, you'd be put on blast if even the most basic of writing software or even web browsers didn't include some form of a spell checker. Lol.
Lets see. 2018. We handed our manufacturing capacity to China, We have a reality TV show host as president, no concorde no twin towers, perpetual war in the desert, California filled with homeless people.
+Mc Swabin memory module configurations - Computer Definition DIMM modules are designated by how the chips are addressed. For example, a 256x64 DIMM means that 256 million 64-bit words of memory are addressed for a total of 2GB. Sometimes, an "M" for "mega" follows the first number; for example, 256Mx64.
super computers today aren't like how they were in this episode. they all use CPUs that are based on the same ones in your desktop or phone, just tens of thousands of them clustered together.
In June 2017, Lockheed Martin announced that the SR-72 would be in development by the early 2020s, with top speed in excess Mach 6. Yeah, Mach 25 had to have been a mistake.
I've sat on a Cray :-) I contracted for the Air Force for a time, they had one sitting in a hallway as a bench. I think it was a Cray-1 or Cray-2. It had padded seats all around it.
I feel I am wasting my PC which was custom built to do over 20 billion calculations per second and can be expanded to do over 40 billion calculations per second. They did all that with just 10 billion calculations per second.
Wait what? This thing does 10billion per second?! Didn't watch the whole video but holy shit. That's a lot for 87. How do you even use all of that at the time?
Many times the price of the CPU is the fraction of the total price of a home computer. That can be avoided with super computers. Supercomputers don't have one CPU but a very large number of CPUs and each of them doesn't need its own monitor or hard disk, RAM, keyboard etc. A burden for the speed of a CPU is its heat. Most CPUs of home computers are air cooled because this is very safe, cheap and convenient. The supercomputers have more advanced ways of cooling like water cooling, liquid nitrogen cooling or in the case of quantum computers liquid helium. Super computers contrary to home computers do very specific tasks. The faster a computer is, the more restricted and specific tasks it does. Home computers are Jacks of all trades.
So where is our Mach 25 super national orient express airplane that gets use coast to coast in 25 minutes that his cray 2 and the windtunnel was working on back in 1987. We dont even have supersonic air travel, So we are actually behind 1987 when it comes to modern air travel speeds. I bet we take longer due to the 10 levels of TSA checks.
Because it's not economically feasible. Majority of travelers want to get to a destination as cheaply as possible. Those who are rich enough buy or lease their own airplane so they have a schedule revolve around them, including using small general aviation airports instead of large commercial ones.
Well strictly speaking the record was 8GHz with a Pentium 4 chip about.. 10 - 15 years ago. We haven't had a processor with stock speeds above 5 Ghz. The first processor to come out with 5GHZ stock is the i7-8086K but it will only be released by end of this year.
These days, it's all about multiple processor cores. The quest for more gigahertz ended when someone realized that the heat densities were on a par with lesser stars.
Whatever happened to the National Aero Space Plane ? It got cancelled in the early 1990's before a prototype could even be made. Bummer. Imagine, San Francisco to New York in 12 minutes !! Today, 28 years later, we don't even have a supersonic passenger plane anymore, since the Concord too was retired. So people still waste precious excruciatingly long hours riding in slow standard planes still to this day. Talk about progress... Fortunately, at least computers are a lot faster and more powerful than even supercomputers from 28 years ago.
33 years from now, some kid is going to trip onto this comment section on accident through the archives and laugh because he has a 900 petaflop MMI with a 40 exabyte wetdrive that destroys our 2020 Fugaku supercomputer.
Check this out....this computer can produce 1.7 billion calculations per second when pushed. Today one can go out and buy an Xbox Series X for 500 bucks that produces 3.8 billion calculations per second...per core. That is absolutely ludicrous.
Remember paul shimler in an older episode saying that the mac was a toy and will fad away after a few months. and now he is showing off mac software xD
Not quite... It's not just how fast the processors were/are that matters, but also HOW that speed is used, and the massive vector processing capabilities of super computers such as the famous Cray line would still be impressive today, compared to any modern computer.
@@looneyburgmusic well that's where the 250 million floating point operations per second metric comes in. Today's smartphones can easily outperform on raw power, but true it's not the power that matters . . . It's the software that drives it. But yes a smartphone in terms of raw performance would drive this to the ground. If the phone were programmed bare metal to run this software it would very easily overtake this supercomputer, but for now it's juggling a taxing os and handling tons of other processes outside of the one on the screen
No, definitely not. In 1990 the fastest x86 was the 486dx-33 which did a little under 2Mflops with its built in FPU and about 25 MIPS integer performance. With 3D graphic cards still many years away, video performance was limited to frame buffers only. The original Cray 1 could do 160 Mflops, which would have smoked anything the PC could do at then. In fact, it took until about 1995 when the Pentium Pro 200MHz was released that it could match the floating speed of the original Cray. From there on , speeds really got fast and eclipsed subsequent supercomputers just from the special vectorized functions within the FPU and MMX extensions (ironically, the same vectorized ability the Cray touted). And once 3d graphic cards came out, supercomputers of years prior became a distant memory of the past.
My 1st gen Ryzen 7 CPU is rated at 1.7 teraFLOPs and graphics card at nearly 10 teraFLOPs and neither parts are top of the line either. Amazing progress we have made.
Computer Chronicles is awesome. However, not that it's the shows fault but 33 years later and there is still nothing close to a 15,000 knot Orient Express supersonic super plane. I think NASA duped us on that one and what a waste of tax payers money, jeez. It was laughable watching this. Taking a look back and watching things like this is a huge eye opener.
I'm an aerospace engineer, it's not oncommon to propose a highly PR favourable project to get funding for peripheral technologies. In this case they probably used the PR momentum to get funding for these Cray supercomputers and R&D for the CFD software.
Mach 20 is pretty much re-entry velocity, that necessitates a heat shield. I remember there was a lot of speculation in the 1980s about sub-orbital hops to travel quickly around the Earth. It's conceivable, but re-entry heat shields are always the limiting factor. (It's not that unreasonable an idea, it takes about 30,000 gallons of kerosene for SpaceX to reach orbit vs about 50,000 gallons to fill up a jumbo jet. The difference is that the rocket can move a few people whereas the jumbo jet transports hundreds.)
Why do people constantly post these types of comments as if they’re the only ones who’ve ever thought of it or amazed that technology from 30+ years ago was slower?
No. 10 billion flops is 10 gflops, which is 0.01 tflops. More like 1000 times if you have at least a 8 TFlops RTX and 1 Tflops top end Ryzen 9 (which is basically a high end PC by 2021 standards). a 386 had 4m flops... so 0.004 gflops. (a 1987 supercomputer was 2500 times faster than a 386)... Aurora will have 1 exaflops... which is 100000x faster than a 2021 high end gaming PC... and probably a million times faster than your average joe's laptop. What does all this mean ? 2020s supercomputers are 40 times faster than 1980s supercomputers relative to commercial pcs of their time.
Isn't it wonderful to see California's San francisco before the tragic tents, poop and needle epidemic? I didn't even know my home town last fall. Sad. But, I guess I shouldn't talk about it, I might offend some delicate bleeding heart that doesn't seem to be offended by the actual problem.
They (big tech owners) love the chaos. They can hide their crimes to their fellow man within the smoke screen created by it. "Who's up for another round of Covid? I already have a vaccine made for it."
I really wish Gary could appreciate now just how much love and respect we have for him for his contributions to the IT industry. He seems to bring such a warmness to these formal earlier episodes before the consumer revolution took off through the 90s.
I love these though. They are so soft spoken and polite, conveying their thoughts clearly.
Yes indeed 😢
He does, he did an interview in 2013 where he says how he managed to get all these old videos archived. It’s thanks to him that we are seeing these
He died in 1994. You're thinking of Stewart.
Back when old men were the best supercomputer users
R
Calls to mind the John von Neumann Supercomputing Facility (closed around 1990 due to loss of funding). Ms. Salowe, RU out there?
For those that don't know . . . This computer had 2gb storage . . . 64 bit words is 8 bytes (250 mil of them) . . . The snapdragon in my phone hits close to 2000000 mflops (vs 250 mflops) on the GPU and around 250000 mflops on the CPU (~2 tflops GPU and ~250 gflops CPU). All packaged in a fraction of a fraction of the size of the cray
At one point they mention researchers at los alamos had access to 50 trillion bits of storage. That = 4.8 terabytes. Quite respectable given the day.
Very much so. Cray had some good machinery.
amazing. how many years it took consumers to get to that point. 25 years.
According to the "bits to terabytes" conversion on Google, 50 trillion bits equals 6.25 terabytes.
actually 40 trillion bits (5tb)..LOL!!! My Samsung s10 plus has 1.5tb worth of storage. What we have now was unthinkable back then the same way what we had then was unthinkable during the 50's.
@@comedicsketches I still say when they were figuring out names that 1000 bits should have been a called bob.
We owe a large amount of what we enjoy today in computing to Seymour Cray and Jay Miner.
Any other millennial devs watching this and marveling at technical accomplishments that happened right before our time? It is making me appreciate my modern hardware even more than I already do.
IT student here-I've watched many of the episodes from the 80's. It's fascinating to hear Microsoft being barely mentioned, that it's mostly about IBM with some Apple machines. Or machines which run Unix
I lived through it and it still amazes me. My 4 year old smartphone is something like 70 times faster than that Cray, with at least twice the memory.
not really, this just makes me realise that things back then were even shitter than i thought
@@appalling22 You lack discernment and obviously don't think very much.
"The CRAY-2 operated at 1.9 billion FLOPS (floating-point operations per second)-while the iPhone 12 operates at 11 trillion FLOPS. " -- I pulled that off of PC magazine's site. That's just crazy
That's Cray-Cray!
dont you guys feel stupid knowing that all you do with your computers that are twice the power that NASA has hoped to get by the end of 1987 is watching youtube and playing games? Think what NASA would've done if they had the computing power of your laptop 40 years ago.
Most people don’t use their computers or devices: they’re just content consumers. Engineers, programmers, and scientists actually use the damn things. I think if they magically had the super computing power of today back in the 60s-80s we would have had so many more breakthroughs. Mostly because the Cold War was going on and the funding was massive for all kinds of science and engineering. Today to get something done you have convince a moron CEO with an MBA to give you a tenth of what you need by dangling the promise of even more money in front of them. It should be embarrassing… the gulf between what we could do and what we actually bother to do these days.
Most people don’t use their computers or devices: they’re just content consumers. Engineers, programmers, and scientists actually use the damn things. I think if they magically had the super computing power of today back in the 60s-80s we would have had so many more breakthroughs. Mostly because the Cold War was going on and the funding was massive for all kinds of science and engineering. Today to get something done you have convince a moron CEO with an MBA to give you a tenth of what you need by dangling the promise of even more money in front of them. It should be embarrassing… the gulf between what we could do and what we actually bother to do these days.
Most people don’t use their computers or devices: they’re just content consumers. Engineers, programmers, and scientists actually use the damn things. I think if they magically had the super computing power of today back in the 60s-80s we would have had so many more breakthroughs. Mostly because the Cold War was going on and the funding was massive for all kinds of science and engineering. Today to get something done you have convince a moron CEO with an MBA to give you a tenth of what you need by dangling the promise of even more money in front of them. It should be embarrassing… the gulf between what we could do and what we actually bother to do these days.
The "don't copy that floppy" line is great
800MHz 800 MFLOPS 2GB memory. That is a low end phone by todays standard.
cool
and we still have no 12 min flights from new york to San Fransisco
We never will, because of economics. (In 5.5 hours, you can fly from SFO to Newark for *$227.* To save five hours, do you really want to pay $30,000?)
@@RonJohn63 thats why Concorde eventually went out of service. They were subsidized by the government and still lost money on the flights which tens of thousands of dollars.
Yes there is but not for the civilians. The Project Aurora that started in the mid-80s was a success but it was deemed too sophisticated for civilian use even for today. It is the hypersonic spy plane that will be called SR-72 once it enters service. There will also be an advanced bomber version of that plane.
not to mention superconductor cars and trains.
@ depends on the plane, and who I'm with.
The HPE Frontier (no.1 supercomputer in 2023) has the performance of almost 1 billion Cray-2's.
I love the sponsorship adverts at the end, saying that their computers come with the 1200 baud modem!
Wow, a whole 0.12Kb a second..
I worked out that it would take somewhere in the region of of 2 years 9 months to download a half hour high definition video. Or around 7 years for a high-definition movie.
But even in 87 that seems a bit behind the times, because my first modem in the early 80s was a 300 baud modem, and then an 800 board modem, and I was using a 1200 baud modem by 85-86.
By the early 90s I had a 19k2baud, and I believe that I was one of the first people that I knew to have a 56k bis standard modem by 95.
After that it just went crazy, when we had our first fibre optic installed in 99 here in the UK, which allowed us to have the earliest 'broadband' (at least, that's what they call it!) with a whopping 256k!!
So in the space of just a little over 10-years, it went from 1200 baud, to broadband in its earliest form at around 256k.
After that it just took off, with 512, and then one megabit, etc and so on.. right up to today, where we have 250mbit from Virgin broadband, with routers here. And just recently they've written to me saying that they're going to be rolling out their first gigabit routers in the near future.
No more waiting 20 minutes for a picture to form on the screen lol.
Yeah really lol I'm spoiled today with my 45MB per second internet speed.
Clint Tapper Factor in error correction and you don’t get all 1200 baud!
Boy thats when you had to like the picture you downloaded because it would take another half hour to download another one and by then the wife would be home! Hahahah
My first modem was 2400 on amiga..there was no internet then ..it was BBS...and when i first registraded on one ..i played football in the street and mom call me that i have phone call...and it was owner off that BBS who then chat with me to see who i am
That was better than my first 300 baud modem. I was just happy to get on the bbs even at 300 baud.
For the record, 40 trillion bits = 5 Terabytes. That's actually impressive as hell.
Todays supercomputers are the equivalent of 16,000,000 Cray 2's
Hello from 3 years on and the US and China have computers that can do 1 Quintillion calculations per second, totally insane , the Supercomputer of 87 was like a modern i7 cpu nothing special lol
you wrong my computer is faster then that and super computers can beat 512,000,000 cray 2's
@@raven4k998 Give me some proof.
@@ducksonplays4190 want proof run cinebench r20 on that cray computer and tell me how long it took it to complete the test? I am guessing 20 years my systems score is 22649 on the first run what does the cray get?
@@ducksonplays4190 no no no you give me some proof lol
They have to bring the Computer Chronicles back.
They are all dead, or retired except for Stuart
you can do the show with new people, just keep the same format and the same style of the show. it was great. that show and The Mechanical Universe, were 2 shows that I use to love watching.
Requires a big budget. Stuart was flying all over the place just for 5 minute interviews.
nahhh.. the more you fly, the more free flights you get, just accumulate those frequent flyer miles. plus, they can use Skype face-time or a dozen other web conferencing technology to save a trip.
Not going to fly as long as the Gestapo stays in airports.
Today my desktop has nearly as much computing power as my state did in 1987 :)
@Vashon Tarpon Anything I need to learn, just press buttons and apply some effort. Cat videos keep me from going postal. All productive :)
If your desktop is based on one of the latest AMD Ryzen processors, it might be way more powerful than the supercomputers in 1987. Take for example today's AMD based XBox Series X. It is just a game console but it already is capable of 12.15 Teraflops (12.15 Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second) With today's desktop gaming computers, there are GPUs that are capable of 25 Teraflops or greater depending on the model. The supercomputer mentioned above is only capable of from 250 Megaflops (Million Floating Point Operations Per Second) with boost up to 1.7 Gigaflops (Billion Floating Point Operations Per Second). They had a plan to upgrade it to enable up to 10 Gigaflops or 10 Billion floating point operations per second. It has a memory of 250 Megabytes, while today's desktop has 8, 16, 32, Gigabytes or even greater.
@@jsmythib unsure what you mean by "going postal" ??
@@RichardHaydenuk Sorry. The term is localized to my region. Often used anecdotally. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_postal
@@jsmythib oh I see, sorry for my ignorance that was inexcusable of me. We have just entered here in Wales another full lockdown, so I will have to look for ways to stop myself from, as you say "going postal".
Thanks for uploading these episodes. I find it fascinating seeing this sort of stuff about technology before was born.
Amazing how a modern smartphone that can fit in your pocket is more powerful than a huge supercomputer that took up an entire room back then.
the largest one had a 5TB drive. show me a phone with a 5TB drive.
@@dadude4960 I am talking in terms of processing power.
@@dadude4960 my galaxy s10 plus has 1.5tb
@@dadude4960 easy, it'll just make that phone a bit bulkier
This episode aired on my mom's birthday! And she and her parents had a Leading Edge computer in the late 1980s.
March 9, 2014 12:48 am
so your mom is 29 now?
No, it aired on her birthday, not on her birthdate.
July 7, 2016 9:11 pm
Neat!
I saw your post 5 years ago. I have come back now to make this post.
Why are these comments manually timestamped?
Love love wang people...the best IT genius ...so happy to have had you in my life ...thanks for the memories 😍🙏
15:06 It's thirty two years later, and room temperature superconductors are still thirty years away.
graphene is a room temperature superconductor however it still can't do quantum processing at room temperature you can really create a fast transistor out of it that does digital logic either but in the future you might be able to do photonic computation with it.
There was the first successful room temperature superconductors demonstrated in 2020.
Damn how far we went with CPU architecture and layers in such tiny scale.
how many layer where they back then cause intel has reduced the layers in their newer chips for better heat dissipation to get more speed out of them just goes to show how things change over the years with chip designs
Wow, supercomputers could lead to practical electric cars! It took more than two decades from this show date, but it happened.
What was briefly mentioned in the Random Access news section of The Computer Chronicles was that some people in the computer industry thought that desktop computer systems could someday be on par with the super computers of the 1980s, well just thirty years later this prediction has practically come true for the most part.
'The Incredible Speed and Power of Super Computers' - Stewart Cheifet (1987)
11:09 So, he's basically saying "I am limited by the technology of my time".
And they arrived on the moon using two toothpicks and an elastic band, who needs Cray 2!
And Karl Heinz Winkler still works there! Correction: He has a LinkedIn profile in which it shows he retired from there in 2009.
Our modern day smartphones have orders of magnitude more computational power than the super computers from the 1980s. Crazy how much and fast technology advances.
In 1987, due to the limits of the super computers at the time, aerodynamic analysis could only be done on the fruit fly.
lol yeah but today it can be done on much larger objects thanks to the much faster desktop pc's
They did it using discrete slices in 2D
And to think how many times more powerful your humble PC is.
@@GaryCameron Cray 2 in this video had about 2GB RAM and 1.6 Gflops of processing power. it must of had massively parallel ALUs in SIMD.
That is still more powerful than most laptops today.
Impressive for 1987.
Got a supercomputer includig a Modem in my pocket
Wow, everyone in comments pointing out that their home computers are way more powerful, great, but what do you do with them? Watch funny cat videos and play games? Really useful...
Our current smart phones are have more computing power than several Cray’s put together.
I hope Gary didnt have to come in on a saturday to record a 1 minute section.
I'm sure he did much more for the episode and probably recorded more than one episode per session. He had a lot of flying to do and business deals to ruin lol
I believe it was mentioned he had some exotic car, a lambo or ferrari or something of that nature, which he took out for the weekend drive to do the filming. So he didn't mind the trip.
Cray 2 was made in Chippewa Falls Wi where Seymour Cray was born near.
Everyone, everything is simply RELATIVE to the technology of the particular era....
5TB. amazing. took me 30 years to double that. damn.
They only just now reached 20TB hard drives
All that computational number crunching can now be done on a mobile phone.
I love how "Spelling Correction" was such a huge feature in that Leading Edge ad... Today, you'd be put on blast if even the most basic of writing software or even web browsers didn't include some form of a spell checker. Lol.
So glad we are not pipe dreaming about ssto’s anymore.
At 2:51 it only takes 12 minutes NY to San Fran = One Continental Breakfast & one bathroom trip...maybe
Does anyone know where the exact Ames Research building Stewart is standing in front of at the very beginning of the video, or if it still exists?
The windtunnel might have been demolished.
I bet my phone is more powerful then those super computers in 1987
If the pulses at the beginning don't wake you up, you're no longer alive.
.25 gigaflops 1.7 gigaflops burst ... 2023 nvidia rtx 4090 -> 82.6 teraflops (50,000 x) intel 13900k 844.8 gigaflops (496 x), amd Epyc 9654 - 5.38 teraflops (3100 x)
My phone is more powerful than that Cray supercomputer, but I never held a ceremony with a band when I bought it. Maybe I should have.
The hype machines of the makers and sellers sufficed
The way iPhone users are you would think they had a full band playing for them when they bought it lol
@Vashon Tarpon You don't know what I did to earn the money to buy it...
Best comment! LOL!
Lets see. 2018. We handed our manufacturing capacity to China, We have a reality TV show host as president, no concorde no twin towers, perpetual war in the desert, California filled with homeless people.
Oh well... At least we have Samsung S9s and Teslas
Escape From LA is a closer version of reality. LOL 🤣
The twin towers were the turning point. Life was so much better in the 80-90s
@@sbrazenor2
Exactly. At this point, the USA is a third world country masquerading as a first world country.
@@gregorymalchuk272Whoever left the note "Banana Republic" was trying to tell the boss how to dress, not how to run the outfit.
Moores law in effect. 256MB of RAM in a 1987 super computer. My Android Wear watch has 512MB
My watch isn't exactly Skynet. But getting Google now cards and other info and apps on the watch is useful, to me.
+Mc Swabin memory module configurations - Computer Definition
DIMM modules are designated by how the chips are addressed. For
example, a 256x64 DIMM means that 256 million 64-bit words of memory are addressed for a total of 2GB. Sometimes, an "M" for "mega" follows the first number; for example, 256Mx64.
Imagine today's super-computers, and now much coolant they need.
none
super computers today aren't like how they were in this episode. they all use CPUs that are based on the same ones in your desktop or phone, just tens of thousands of them clustered together.
@19:02: I didn't realize Billybob Thorton was a computer scientist!
Doesnt look anything like him...
Stewart's comb-over is so 1930's. Glad my generation embraced baldness. Baldies of my generation never had to endure such embarrassing hair-play.
😂😂😂
I do believe William Shatner took the first toupee to space! (Somebody had to do it.)
@@Grunchy005 "Spock, that's my smock!"
Comb-overs are mainly for the pleasure of the person displaying it. They could care less what anyone thinks of it.
...and today, a typical home computer used for games has 8-12 processors running at 4 thousand-million operations per second.
2020 here, you're Samsung phone can do more than any super computer in the 80's up to the late 90's.
careful now the government hears that they might steal your smart phone dude
It's like a different planet..
Japan now has the fastest super computer
What will happen to the comb-over in a wind tunnel?
10 tflops is around $250 now, second hand.
Wait Mach 25? That can't be right. It's 2020 and nothing is that fast yet.
In June 2017, Lockheed Martin announced that the SR-72 would be in development by the early 2020s, with top speed in excess Mach 6.
Yeah, Mach 25 had to have been a mistake.
I've sat on a Cray :-) I contracted for the Air Force for a time, they had one sitting in a hallway as a bench. I think it was a Cray-1 or Cray-2. It had padded seats all around it.
So, where're our hypersonic planes, huh? Looks like those supercomputers didn't really bring anything new on the table.
I feel I am wasting my PC which was custom built to do over 20 billion calculations per second and can be expanded to do over 40 billion calculations per second. They did all that with just 10 billion calculations per second.
Wait what? This thing does 10billion per second?! Didn't watch the whole video but holy shit. That's a lot for 87. How do you even use all of that at the time?
The 10 billion would be id they had 2 which they got later I think
7:42 I think NASA found alien life
5TB storage back in 87.
I wonder where all those Cray 2 supercomputers are today.
At 4:40 The Cray 2 - while this was filmed Seymour Cray was digging his tunnel...
11:27 IT'S SHRINKING! IT'S SHRINKING!
"My God....it's full of stars"
40 trillion bits of storage translates to 5TB
I Miss Gary . Bill Killed Him :( QC
Many times the price of the CPU is the fraction of the total price of a home computer. That can be avoided with super computers. Supercomputers don't have one CPU but a very large number of CPUs and each of them doesn't need its own monitor or hard disk, RAM, keyboard etc.
A burden for the speed of a CPU is its heat. Most CPUs of home computers are air cooled because this is very safe, cheap and convenient. The supercomputers have more advanced ways of cooling like water cooling, liquid nitrogen cooling or in the case of quantum computers liquid helium.
Super computers contrary to home computers do very specific tasks. The faster a computer is, the more restricted and specific tasks it does. Home computers are Jacks of all trades.
Your comment shows you really have no clue about supercomputers 😀
So where is our Mach 25 super national orient express airplane that gets use coast to coast in 25 minutes that his cray 2 and the windtunnel was working on back in 1987. We dont even have supersonic air travel, So we are actually behind 1987 when it comes to modern air travel speeds. I bet we take longer due to the 10 levels of TSA checks.
Well there was the concord but we know how they turned out
Because it's not economically feasible. Majority of travelers want to get to a destination as cheaply as possible. Those who are rich enough buy or lease their own airplane so they have a schedule revolve around them, including using small general aviation airports instead of large commercial ones.
12 minutes
Pure gold (rush)
Wait whats a AT super board? Make a AT computer into a supercomputer why cant I find one of these?
You can do fluid simulations on your home computer in a web browser! haxiomic.github.io/GPU-Fluid-Experiments/html5/
Then: Wow! We went up 4 MHz!
Now: wow.. we FINALLY got to 4 GHz?
Well strictly speaking the record was 8GHz with a Pentium 4 chip about.. 10 - 15 years ago. We haven't had a processor with stock speeds above 5 Ghz. The first processor to come out with 5GHZ stock is the i7-8086K but it will only be released by end of this year.
Yes, but the GHz war ended a long time ago in the mid 2000s. That of course doesnt mean computers aren't getting faster.
These days, it's all about multiple processor cores. The quest for more gigahertz ended when someone realized that the heat densities were on a par with lesser stars.
For a long time it was all about clock speed, then it became about efficiency with a lower clock speed, now it's about both, plus core count.
Whatever happened to the National Aero Space Plane ? It got cancelled in the early 1990's before a prototype could even be made. Bummer.
Imagine, San Francisco to New York in 12 minutes !!
Today, 28 years later, we don't even have a supersonic passenger plane anymore, since the Concord too was retired. So people still waste precious excruciatingly long hours riding in slow standard planes still to this day. Talk about progress...
Fortunately, at least computers are a lot faster and more powerful than even supercomputers from 28 years ago.
AlainHubert It didnt.. it has a new name and its part of black military project, call the "Aurora,,
+jednoucelovy
There is one big problem with Elon Musk's Hyperloop concept: it can't go anywhere. Certainly not over oceans, like planes do.
jednoucelovy the hyperloop, what a joke! That hunk of junk won't be going mainstream anytime soon
@@Petr75661 Reading this comment 7 years later 😂
2:14 Okay, so where’s that plane at?
I watched this on a tablet that probably destroys that super computer
33 years from now, some kid is going to trip onto this comment section on accident through the archives and laugh because he has a 900 petaflop MMI with a 40 exabyte wetdrive that destroys our 2020 Fugaku supercomputer.
@@Zarnubius lmao yep
我們現在已經在用這種超級電腦等級的顯卡在打遊戲了
My ipad can do this. Amazing
Check this out....this computer can produce 1.7 billion calculations per second when pushed. Today one can go out and buy an Xbox Series X for 500 bucks that produces 3.8 billion calculations per second...per core. That is absolutely ludicrous.
Remember paul shimler in an older episode saying that the mac was a toy and will fad away after a few months. and now he is showing off mac software xD
No, he said that the Mac is a good machine but he does not believe it will see success in the business/office market. Which I guess he was correct on
An iPhone 4 has more power processing power than a Cray 2
super humans . . . baby
My pc does what the supercomputer can do but I use it for nothing special so whats the point
Ha! @11:35, that galaxy collision simulation became a screen saver for Linux boxes within 10 years of the airing of this episode.
Some of the guys interviewed here probably retired 30+ years ago.
30+ years ago is 1991 or further back. So that means they were retiring right after airing the episode.
impressive for its time, but im sure today there is an iphone app for this
WELL ITS 2023 SOOOOOO…. WHERES OUR 12 MIN CA TO NY FLIGHTS (;
10 Ghz "super computer" a today's Quad Core running at 2.4 Ghz for a mere 50 dollars could match that beast... well still impresive for the time.
Not quite...
It's not just how fast the processors were/are that matters, but also HOW that speed is used, and the massive vector processing capabilities of super computers such as the famous Cray line would still be impressive today, compared to any modern computer.
@@looneyburgmusic well that's where the 250 million floating point operations per second metric comes in. Today's smartphones can easily outperform on raw power, but true it's not the power that matters . . . It's the software that drives it. But yes a smartphone in terms of raw performance would drive this to the ground. If the phone were programmed bare metal to run this software it would very easily overtake this supercomputer, but for now it's juggling a taxing os and handling tons of other processes outside of the one on the screen
5:29 Isn't this man the SEO of ENCOM?
Did they get the power of a cray 1 by 1990 in a PC?
No, definitely not. In 1990 the fastest x86 was the 486dx-33 which did a little under 2Mflops with its built in FPU and about 25 MIPS integer performance. With 3D graphic cards still many years away, video performance was limited to frame buffers only. The original Cray 1 could do 160 Mflops, which would have smoked anything the PC could do at then. In fact, it took until about 1995 when the Pentium Pro 200MHz was released that it could match the floating speed of the original Cray. From there on , speeds really got fast and eclipsed subsequent supercomputers just from the special vectorized functions within the FPU and MMX extensions (ironically, the same vectorized ability the Cray touted). And once 3d graphic cards came out, supercomputers of years prior became a distant memory of the past.
My 1st gen Ryzen 7 CPU is rated at 1.7 teraFLOPs and graphics card at nearly 10 teraFLOPs and neither parts are top of the line either. Amazing progress we have made.
Computers made people more dumb
I guess a Raspberry Pi easily beats that Cray.
Back in the old days we used thousands of Asians equipped with abacuses to simulate fluid dynamics.
They are sadly out of a job now.
Computer Chronicles is awesome. However, not that it's the shows fault but 33 years later and there is still nothing close to a 15,000 knot Orient Express supersonic super plane. I think NASA duped us on that one and what a waste of tax payers money, jeez. It was laughable watching this. Taking a look back and watching things like this is a huge eye opener.
I'm an aerospace engineer, it's not oncommon to propose a highly PR favourable project to get funding for peripheral technologies. In this case they probably used the PR momentum to get funding for these Cray supercomputers and R&D for the CFD software.
Mach 20 is pretty much re-entry velocity, that necessitates a heat shield.
I remember there was a lot of speculation in the 1980s about sub-orbital hops to travel quickly around the Earth. It's conceivable, but re-entry heat shields are always the limiting factor.
(It's not that unreasonable an idea, it takes about 30,000 gallons of kerosene for SpaceX to reach orbit vs about 50,000 gallons to fill up a jumbo jet. The difference is that the rocket can move a few people whereas the jumbo jet transports hundreds.)
Can it Play Crysis?
anything can run that old game.
Wow, it must have taken you a good 2, 3 seconds to think of that one.
So Cray-2 had about 2 GB of RAM 😀
Their typical Super Computer is 250,000 times less powerful then my standard PC.
Imagine what they got for a standard super computer today
Why do people constantly post these types of comments as if they’re the only ones who’ve ever thought of it or amazed that technology from 30+ years ago was slower?
No. 10 billion flops is 10 gflops, which is 0.01 tflops. More like 1000 times if you have at least a 8 TFlops RTX and 1 Tflops top end Ryzen 9 (which is basically a high end PC by 2021 standards). a 386 had 4m flops... so 0.004 gflops. (a 1987 supercomputer was 2500 times faster than a 386)... Aurora will have 1 exaflops... which is 100000x faster than a 2021 high end gaming PC... and probably a million times faster than your average joe's laptop. What does all this mean ? 2020s supercomputers are 40 times faster than 1980s supercomputers relative to commercial pcs of their time.
why not the speed of a super computer in a tooth filling ?
Isn't it wonderful to see California's San francisco before the tragic tents, poop and needle epidemic? I didn't even know my home town last fall. Sad. But, I guess I shouldn't talk about it, I might offend some delicate bleeding heart that doesn't seem to be offended by the actual problem.
@Selim Sultan Akbar But this is my country you duffis. This is America, not some 3 world hell hole. Duh!
@Selim Sultan Akbar Your a sick puppy...
They (big tech owners) love the chaos. They can hide their crimes to their fellow man within the smoke screen created by it. "Who's up for another round of Covid? I already have a vaccine made for it."
@@PearComputingDevices it is really sad, all of California has fallen pretty low
11:35... That doesn't look too correct.