The Amiga Is A Toy - By Local Government Official...

[vidarh]

We have many extra, so how about we export a shipload of 'Tea Party' activists to Scotland? They will follow them around with bullhorns ranting about the taxes, gov'mnt overstepping, and hitler!

Given that there's universal health care, they'd probably be terrified of the thought of being shipped off to the communist gulag of Scotland and avoid going to the doctor at all cost in case they'd be subjected to the death panels.

I picture them trying to survive through winter in the Scottish highlands armed to the teeth, shooting at any government official trying to get to them.

[vidarh]

@ Vidarh
(PS:It's always winter here in Scotland, my granda once told me about this thing called the SUN but I think he was making it up...)

Yeah, yeah.. I'm Norwegian. You guys don't know what winter is

(though apparently I probably have a Scottish slave amongst my viking-age ancestors, according to DNA testing one of my cousins had done, so I guess that explains why I'm a bit of a softie when it comes to the weather)

[vidarh]

Yeah, I suppose we should roll our spineless selves over and take it in the back end like any good subject of the crown, whilst our empire is slowly dissolved.

Given the election results, I see you've collectively already bent over and dropped your pants.

[vidarh]

But let me tell you what a real WINTER is: When I was in the army I was stationed in the northern part of Norway, where we sometimes had to sleep in a tent when there was -20° Celsius (and sometimes even colder) outside.

I think you confused the seasons. I've experienced -30 for several weeks straight near Oslo. That was starting to feel a bit nippy. When it was -20 I used to sleep with my window open.

That said, I've visited Northern Alberta, Canada in October and that makes me never want to set foot anywhere in Northern Canada during their actual winter.

[vidarh]

It must be said that every year it's the same, it snows in Oslo which in turn leads to complete chaos in the traffic, it's like you people suddenly realize too late that it's winter now, and maybe it will snow as well. Funny to watch every time :roflmao:

I live in London now, and if you think what happpens in Oslo is chaos, you should see what happened last winter when it snowed in London. Whole town practically stopped for 2-3 days. People didn't dare to drive, or drove so slow I could overtake them on foot. Over maybe 20-30 cm of snow.

And of course tons of trains were cancelled, because, you know, a train couldn't possibly handle a tiny bit of snow on the tracks.

[vidarh]

I've never heard of Cray using 68040's, they'd be far too slow. NCR did some unix boxes with them, but they were outclassed by intel pretty quickly.

SGI and Sun and a bunch of others did 68k based Unix boxes too. My university still had a bunch of Sun boxes with 68020's in them in '94, though at point they were being slowly replaced by MIPS powered SGI's.

Also never heard Cray mentioned as a user. It's not that the CPU would be too slow per se for normal instructions,  but that it's not a vector unit - the entire point of at least Cray's early machines was that they offered extremely wide vector units. As far as I know, Cray only used their own designed CPU's until 1993 when they released a series based on the DEC Alpha.

It's not impossible they might have used 68k CPU's in "support" functions (though I have no idea if they did) such as terminals/operator consoles or to control peripherals or stuff like that (just like some Amiga models had a 6502 derivative on the keyboard, and some Amiga SCSI cards had a Z80 on them...), but certainly not as the main CPU.

[vidarh]

I saw one on a documentary. It had a sign on it, "Cray supercomputer." Next line said, "68040"

Unlikely to have referred to the main CPUs. When the 68040 was launched in 1990, Cray just released an "entry level" super computer at $2.2 million - their cheapest model at that point with one or two 166MHz custom CPU's with lots of vector math support.

However I think I might've found a clue. The Cray EL-90 used 68k series CPU's to control their I/O subsystem and serial port. So there might've been 68040's in some models as glorified embedded microcontrollers instead of custom chips. The Cray's were/are expensive enough that throwing a 68040 or ten in there to offload tasks like that off the main CPUs wouldn't affect the price much.

Also I heard of a supercomputer - not sure which one using about 8 or 12 68040s, when the 68040 was brand new.

There's a failed supercomputer company called Myrias that did actually launch a supercomputer called the SPS-3 that had 48 x 68040's in September 1990. It might've competed favorably with the very smallest (1 or 2 CPU) Cray model for vector maths, and likely beaten it for non-vector stuff (Cray's were at the time geared pretty much 100% towards vector math)