[geeks] Best Vista story I've seen

[Lionel Peterson]

On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 19:18, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Tue, 20 Feb 2007 @ 18:00 -0500, Joshua Boyd said:
> 
> > On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 06:07:10PM -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > 
> > > Man... supercomputing power is now being used for mindless
> > > entertainment.
> > > 
> > > Can you imagine the look someone would have given you if you asked them,
> > > in 1986, if you could use their Cray to play Doom?
> > 
> > I'm sure someone must have investigated gaming with that sort of hardware.
> 
> Well, there are some Cray games in one of the archives.
> 
> Still... I remember when some friends and I requested supercomputer time
> for a college numerical computation assignment.  It was taking our Sun
> systems 3 weeks for a run.
> 
> The gopher we had to request time from looked at us as if we'd asked to
> take Air Force One for a joyride.

Supposedly there was a network of Supercomputer Centers available to the
public, funded by the federal government - there was one in NJ, and
another in Urbana, Illinois (where a certain fellow decided to write a
browser with some friends of his), and I think there were three or four
more, IIRC...

The IDEA was that supercomputer time was available to educational
organizations, government organizations, and other, non-commercial
entities on a shared basis - not sure how it allplayed out...

Lionel