🚀 go-pugleaf

About being "fed up with MIPS"

Two years ago I bought a Mac II, which was fast as blazes at WYSWYG
word processing.  It blew the doors off the old DLION I used to use.
It compiled at 45,000 lines per minute.  To friends, I predicted the
hunger for PC cycles would drop in the next five years.  Most people
wouldn't need more than 3 MIPs.

But today, a 1000*1000*24bit graphics display takes at least 10 MIPS
to refresh interactively.  Today's Mac II struggles at 3-4 MIPS and
1/4 the resolution.  It is now "the premier platform for photographic
visual arts."

But most office clerical work needs no more than an XT 8088 machine
and WordPerfect.  They don't need color, SPICE, or a large database.
Let's hope these clericals are doomed, or the PC industry will die as
they flourish.

To keep the PC industry thriving we must produce many more technicians
and design engineers, to use high-MIPS CPUs in design optimization and
simulation.  There is a big possibility that the U.S.  educational
system will let us down.  Science and Engineering are unpopular
subjects; everyone wants to be a business major.

So I'm again predicting doom for the PC industry, but this time for
different reasons.

Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies