simpleminded historical "mips

Peter

Yes, I get pop-ups when I run from the address line (eg. "javascript: timeD = timeB - timeA; print (timeD);") but the command line version doesn't do this.

In case it's of any interest, I just now installed my old M$ C compiler and ran some crude tests on my cheap little Via PC (Eden processor, 600 Mhz, not exactly sure what memory access time is even though board is supposed to run the memory at 266Mhz, people have told me the cpu is about the same speed as a 300 or 400 Mhz Intel processor) which has 1GB of memory that cost me CAD 139 (for that money, I guess it's not the error-correcting kind). Malloc'ed 400 MB of memory and put 100 million 32 bit pointers in it (ie., looping 100 million times). Took 8 seconds. A do-nothing version of the loop took 6 seconds which says the memory writes took only about 2 seconds, but they were sequential so I suppose some caching was involved. The same loop using a double as the counter, without touching memory, took 9 seconds, which seems about 4 times faster than Javascript, which seems a credit to Javascript.

The C version seems at least several hundred times faster than the old mod 30! Makes we want to write some old-fashioned apps and keep them in memory - the heck with the disks!

I wonder how different things might be now if this kind of cheap speed and capacity had been available thirty years ago.

Cheers, p