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Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

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Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#31

Post by cgh »

dan_hawkins wrote: post #30
siffland wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the beginning of Byte magazine until about 1984 are really fun to read. The ads were probably annoying at the time of release, but not they are fun and interesting to read. I like the 1983 issue with imaging where they are talking about movie effects for "Tron" and "Revenge of the Jedi". I wished they would of had more UNIX in the issues, however it was usually unaffordable. But a fun look, at least for me, to t…

"Revenge of the Jedi" - you mean "Return of the Jedi" right? :D Although "Revenge of the Jedi" would be awesome!

The original title was actually Revenge of the Jedi and there are still old posters and ads around for it, eg https://entertainment.time.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/20...

Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#32

Post by flyinghamster »

tr352 wrote: post #15

They write it's "interesting to note" the the IBM PC XT 8088 performed better than the PDP-11/23. I suppose the PDP was a much more expensive machine.

The 11/23 was one of the lower-priced PDP-11s, based on the F-11 chipset. I'm pretty sure it would have cost a fair bit more than an XT, though, especially fitted out with the necessary memory and peripherals.

That being said, Heathkit offered earlier LSI-11 machines (which used bit-slice processors) for several years. As a student at a high school with an 11/34, I would have loved to have an H11 or H11A at home, but the Apple II+ that we did have served the family well.

A factory-assembled and tested Heathkit H11A, sans memory, storage, or terminal, was $1895 in 1970s money.[1] Buying the kit would save you $700, which would have been well worth it since the CPU board was a stock DEC KD11-HA [2], already assembled and tested anyway.

[1] https://heathkit.garlanger.com/hardware/systems/H11/ [2] http://gunkies.org/wiki/LSI-11/2

Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#35

Post by [deleted] »

flyinghamster wrote: post #32
tr352 wrote: post #15

They write it's "interesting to note" the the IBM PC XT 8088 performed better than the PDP-11/23. I suppose the PDP was a much more expensive machine.

The 11/23 was one of the lower-priced PDP-11s, based on the F-11 chipset. I'm pretty sure it would have cost a fair bit more than an XT, though, especially fitted out with the necessary memory and peripherals. That being said, Heathkit offered earlier LSI-11 machines (which used bit-slice processors) for several years. As a student at a high school with an 11/34, I would have loved to have an H11 or H11A at home, but…

[deleted]

Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#36

Post by msla »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #20
rsecora wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means the VAX-11/760 (120.000$-160.000$) was 27 times slower for that benchmark. And the PC-XT running PC/IX was 260x slower.

The VAX was also the size of a wardrobe. Interesting to see that it was still leading the pack, more or less, even though it was a 1977 design compared to the smaller and cheaper micros from the 80s - including the Lisa, which clearly was not a fast computer.

There were desktop VAX systems. The MicroVAX II, for example:

http://gunkies.org/wiki/MicroVAX_II

The VAX ISA was implemented in a wide range of technologies, from TTL (the 1970s VAXen) up through true microprocessors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroVAX_78032

Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#37

Post by msla »

kps wrote: post #33
tr352 wrote: post #15

They write it's "interesting to note" the the IBM PC XT 8088 performed better than the PDP-11/23. I suppose the PDP was a much more expensive machine.

The PC also had no MMU or OS overhead.

> The PC also had no MMU or OS overhead.

No MMU, sure, but the whole point of this was to benchmark an OS. It's all about the OS overhead.

Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#38

Post by msla »

Maakuth wrote: post #9

Laying out code in variable width font like a boss :). I love reading these BYTE scans from archive.org, they are from such a different computing world. Yet UNIX is the same.

> Yet UNIX is the same.

Use V7 Unix in an emulator and say that. Unix didn't have networking, mmap(), or job control shells back then, and that's about the level some of the benchmarked Unix variants were at.

Re: Byte magazine (1984): Benchmarking Unix

#39

Post by jhallenworld »

kps wrote: post #33
tr352 wrote: post #15

They write it's "interesting to note" the the IBM PC XT 8088 performed better than the PDP-11/23. I suppose the PDP was a much more expensive machine.

The PC also had no MMU or OS overhead.

The 68K had no MMU or even segment registers, so the 68K machines that can run UNIX had, at the very least, some kind of external memory offset adder. I did not know the Apple Lisa had this- it's interesting because Macs didn't have it and could not run UNIX.
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