On Tuesday, August 7, 2001, at 05:41 PM, David Honig wrote:
At 12:34 PM 8/7/01 -0700, Tim May wrote:
Interestingly, about 15-20 years ago there was much talk of the "3M" machine: a megapixel display, a megabyte of memory, and a million instructions per second.
I heard about it as the 1-M machine, with same qualifications. It had to have virtual memory to count as a real machine; I think the 386 or later had one. Myself, I shared a monochrome 68K-based Sun3, and thought myself lucky. And only vision labs had cameras attached.
I had a Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machine on my desk--well, the monitor for it, at least. A few megs of RAM, a MIPS or so of processing power, and a 1024 x 768 (IIRC) monochrome display. And an "awesome" (by the standards of 1985) 512 x 512 x 24 bits "Color System." Did I have a camera attached? Yeah, in the lab next door. Which explains why I skipped getting another IBM PC or Compaq when I left and instead got a Mac Plus. A lot less powerful than a Symbolics, but a lot more like a Symbolics than an IBM PC or PC AT was. ( I expect 98% of the readers here have no idea what a "Symbolics" is or was.) --Tim May