Sunday, October 10, 2021
Time was a whole bunch of money!
In previous item I noted that the AI speech synthesizer for a video failed to look up an unfamiliar word, just tried to pronounce it without even following normal English semi-rules. How much time would the lookup take? Maybe 20 milliseconds at best, a few seconds at worst. Locating a fact on the web is much slower and less predictable than internal processing, even if the synthesizer had a 'favored' connection to Google.
Time was a vastly more important limiting factor than memory size in the early mainframe era, mainly because computers were rented. We usually focus on the limited memory and miss the time cost.
Chart from Datamation June '64.
The cost to compile 100 COBOL statements varied unpredictably from twenty cents to twenty dollars! No correlation with monthly rental. Note that IBM 70xx series computers were at both ends of the scale.
Unsurprisingly, the same issue of Datamation had a long article on the pros and cons of timesharing.
The cost to compile 100 COBOL statements varied unpredictably from twenty cents to twenty dollars! No correlation with monthly rental. Note that IBM 70xx series computers were at both ends of the scale.
Unsurprisingly, the same issue of Datamation had a long article on the pros and cons of timesharing.
Labels: Constants and Variables, Metrology
¶ 3:21 PM
