The Power of the NORC 3755

General purpose timesharing is not a supercomputer. We had one customer who shipped compiler jobs from IBM 3033s and 4341s to the PDP-10 system to do the grunt work. I've always called this user thruput. TOPS-10 did it better than anybody (small bias here). There would no such thing as user thruput on a supercomputer, as we thought of them.

I would not consider any system that compiled stuff as its normal SOP a supercomputer. Note that I distinguish compiling from executing the code produced by the compiler. This may not be a distinction anymore.

Well, if the biz wishes to change the definition, that's fine. But it can't change the way we used the word in the past. I do not consider delivery of general purpose computing services to be a function of a supercomputer. There was a reason to have the distinction. If we were doing software OS design for a supercomputer, we certainly would have had a completely different set of goals, non-goals and do extremely different trade-offs. Think about PI-level interrupts.

clear specs.

It will have the side effect of stopping innovation, new thinking, and probably most learning....nope...definitely learning.

People will stop learning how to think.

BAH