Instructions Per Second Per Ton

It was just another day at work today, and as often occurs, one of my co-workers and I took a little trip down "tangential road". Todays branching path to "LOL" started out with my co-worker talking about the TV show "How It's Made" and his watching of an episode about the making of player pianos.

He explained the process of how they are made on his way to the punchline that the factory that the "player ribbons" (I'm not sure that that is the correct term, but I think you can get the idea from it) are made in is still using 5¼ inch floppies in an old Apple IIe to control the "punch machine". This alone got a few laughs out of us, but the best was yet to come.

The discussion then turned to the Apple IIe, with neither of us being able to remember what the processor was that was used in those machines. Google led us to the a vintage computer site with all sorts of fun information on some older goodies like the Apple IIe, the Compaq Portable and the Commodore PET 2001.

At this point, my co-worker commented on how the Commodore PET 2001 looked like the quintessential perception of what futuristic computers looked like in 70's media. This started a new branch of conversation that brought us to www.starringthecomputer.com.

There are some real doozies on starringthecomputer.com, like the Burroughs B205 and the GE Differential Analyzer. Talking about these early creations of computing awesomeness sparked my co-worker's memory and he had me click on, of all things, the Beverly Hills Cop 3 listing on starringthecomputer.com. This led us to the "mother of all machines", the IBM AN/FSQ-7.

There is so much hilarity contained in the statistics of the Wikipedia page for the AN/FSQ-7, I got quite a good laugh from that alone. Here is a table of the highlights:

After we calmed down from that, I decided to calculate the processing power in instructions per second per ton just for laughs. This works out to be 272.73 i/s/t! Wow.

My co-worker then started wondering how that compared to, say, an average second or third grader. Well, the average weight of a 7-8 year old is about 50 lbs. and we guessed that a 2nd grader could probably do about 30 simple instructions in about a minute. Do note, the 30 instructions per minute has no scientific basis, but is just a number pulled out of our asses. This works out to be 0.5 instructions per second for our second grader which weighs 0.025 tons. This works out to be 20 i/s/t for our estimation of an average second grader. This means that the AN/FSQ-7, a 275 ton, half acre computer, is only a bit over 13 times faster in i/s/t than a second grader.

Don't let anyone ever tell that math and computers are not fun!