[GreenKeys] USB/RS232

[Craig Sawyers]

> It amazes me how fast we are dumping our old technology.  My
> floppy drive died
> so I went to Compusa to get a new one.

Yup.  I've just bought a new HP whizz bang machine, and it doesn't have a
floppy at all.  It has 6 USB ports on the back and 2 on the front, one com
port and a parallel port.  You're intended to use the CD read/write as the
backup, or an external hard drive (yup - my Maxtor one is USB).

Running a benchmark test on this HP (single P4 3GHz) reveals that it does
1300 double precision MIPS.  The CRAY 1 supercomputer of 1977 had a
theoretical top speed of 160MIPS and could sustain about 50MIPS when running
a programme.
So a current generation desktop PC is around 8 times quicker than a CRAY 1.
A major contributing factor is the clock speed of course - the CRAY 1 had an
80MHz clock - around 40 times slower than today's PC's.

Talking to the guy who saved my data from my very dead previous computer, he
said that the next things to go are the connectors for keyboard and mouse -
because new keyboards and mice are going across to USB.  Things move on
apace.

Craig