Everyone here should read this.. I thought I'd seen

From: Derek Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Fri Dec 3 22:25:41 1999

> Supercomputers, OTOH, are definitely lusted after by Iraq, Iran and several
> other "enemies" of the US plus Russia and China and I guess we can
> understand an assured destruct contract on those. Wish there was a clearing
> house to get those machines and associated operational support to North
> American or other Western Universities for research use instead of
> scrapping them.

OK, but that doesn't explain the IBM 1130, because that's hardly a
supercomputer. There is an April Fool's post in which K&R admit UNIX was a
hoax:

   We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

   for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);

   To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
   allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually
   thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
   progress back 20 or more years.

My point is that you could do the same thing with the 1130. I'm sure that
even the poorest of dirt-poor countries with any computers have more
powerful ones than the 1130.

-- Derek
Received on Fri Dec 03 1999 - 22:25:41 GMT