On Wed, 2 Feb 2000 17:11:29 -0600 (CST) 
 Dave Huang <khym@bga.com> wrote:

 > Well, I'd say it's fast compared to MacOS or Windows 9x/NT on the same
 > hardware. However, it's slow compared to the latest hardware :) Whether
 > it's fast enough depends on what you want to do... I'd disagree that an
 > old Mac would be too slow for doing school assignments though; when I
 > was in school, intro to programming type assignments were done on Mac
 > Pluses and Mac SEs (Lightspeed Pascal, I think), and the speed seemed

Heh... our official CS homework was all to be done on a Sequent Symmetry,
an old 20-i386 model, which always had no less than 50 people logged
into it at once.

...of course, the HP 9000/360 [25MHz 68030] at my desk was lightning
fast by comparison (actually, it was not really an old machine at the
time, either, so that's what all my homework was done on, right up
until I had to make sure it actually *compiled* on the Sequent :-)

Really... I can't imagine using *anything but* a mid-speed 68030 for
doing programming class assignments on :-)

 > fine... I don't think the CPU power needed by such programs has
 > really increased over the years :) The assignments for the partial
 > differential equations class were done on some vector processing VAX
 > running VMS though :)

Heh... We (well, the Chemistry dept.) had a VAX 9000 for that sort
of stuff, actually :-)

        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>