[TUHS] A/UX [was Linux is on-topic]

[Paul Winalski]

On 8/14/20, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> Wasn't it Grace Hopper who used to demonstrate a nanosecond by holding up
> a foot of wire?

Yes.  She gave a talk back in 1982 at DEC's software engineering
facility.  She used the foot-long wire to illustrate a nanosecond and
a big coil of wire for a microsecond.  After the talk she handed out
nanoseconds as souvenirs.  I still have mine.  Her talk was on the
future of computing, and the point she was making with the nanosecond
was that eventually there's a limit to Moore's Law., and any further
computational speedups would require parallelism.  She drew an analogy
to the problem of a 19th century carter having to haul a load too
heavy for one horse.  The solution isn't to breed bigger horses--it's
to hook up two of them.  And here we are today, with multi-core
processors.

-Paul W.