🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov13.152301.20527@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>, clc5q@uvacs.cs.Virginia.EDU (Clark L. Coleman) writes:
|> 
|> "Five years from now, we should be at 100 billion gigaFLOPS.  A problem that
|> takes three months to do now, we want to do in a day."  
|> -- Steve Chen, Time magazine article, March 28, 1988, page 58.
|> 
|> 100 billion gigaFLOPS is 100 million teraFLOPS, which sounds very fast to
|> me.  "Five years from now" is coming up in a few months.  100 billion GFLOPS
|> sounds ambitious.

It is safe to assume that Time magazine got confused by the billions of
gigaflops. I don't think Chen said that, in the interview. Presumably he
said 100 gigaflops and then had to explain to the reporter what that meant.
And the reporter, to make the point clear, converted it to "100 billion
gigaflops".
100 GFlops for 1993 is about right, by the way.

|> I also noted in this issue that the Cray-3 was "due to be released in 1989."

In this case, whatever Chen actually said, he was wrong.

Daan Sandee                                           sandee@think.com
Thinking Machines Corporation
Cambridge, Mass 02142                                 (617) 234-5044