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Emil Jacobs - Collectifission

Fun fact: The BESM-6 was a Soviet era computer used for a wide variety of tasks, like the processing of the space mission telemetry data of the Apollo-Soyuz test mission in 1975. Between 1968 and 1987 they built 355 of these massive room sized computers. Each had a computing power of 418 kiloflops.

A Rasberry Pi 5 has 24,000x the computing power of one of those and 70x of all of them combined.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BESM-6

en.wikipedia.orgBESM-6 - Wikipedia

@collectifission @cstross Its address space was only 15 bits, i.e. half that of a typical Z80/6502 machine, though I’m guessing the CPU used the other bit as a flag of some sort? Presumably in the USSR in 1975, having 32k of addressable space was seen as ample

@acb @collectifission Remember the USSR widely considered computers (then primarily business tools) as anti-Soviet, circa 1950-54? (In terms eerily familiar to students of western moral panics.) That set them back about a decade, during the mainframe era. And the USSR's tendency to run on central planning probably accounts for the rest.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernet

en.wikipedia.orgCybernetics in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia

@cstross @collectifission For a while, they did some novel computer designs. They used base 3 for a while, and then when they went to binary, used base minus 2 instead of two’s complement for negative numbers. Though then Khrushchev or someone gave the directive to just clone US computers, and all that got shut down

@collectifission Quick math note: I believe the Pi5 does about 10GFLOPS, which is "only" about 70 times the combined performance of those behemoths.

Still amazing, but I suspect we dropped a conversion somewhere.

@collectifission (Ah, it's about 24k times the performance of *one* of them, not *all* of them. Sorry to be That Guy, I'll show myself out.)

@dotcolm Yes, you're right, that was my mistake. Thanks for the correction 🙂

@collectifission It's still freaking incredible though, isn't it. I have little computers, costing about €4 each, doing nothing more advanced than turning radiators on and off, which are several orders of magnitude faster than the computers which landed people on the Moon.

@collectifission Some years ago I played in an RPG that required us to bring a prop that represented our character, and have a little scene explaining it.
I brought a raspberry pi: "This thing is at least a couple of orders of magnitude better than my first computer by every axis I can think to measure including price, and fits into my pocket. Imagine what a couple of human generations will do to that."