[Coco] mainframe

[Mark McDougall]

On 15/11/2014 12:23 AM, Bruce W. Calkins wrote:

> When I got my first CoCo my "little" brother was working with the Xerox
> Sigma 7 & 9 series Mainframe computers.  While I was learning about
> kilobytes he was working with Gigabytes, where I had a clock speed of .89
> MHz he was dealing with Rapid Access Devices rated in GigaHz .

Nothing I read about the Sigma series suggests they had anything to do with 
gigabytes or gigahertz. Memory was measures in kB (or kWords) and hard disks 
were 400MB. FLOPS were in the order of uS.

In fact it looks like you could emulate one on a modern PC.

So methinks little brother was embellishing the truth a little.

Mainframes aren't renown for their processing power; more-so for their I/O 
throughput. Getting data to/from terminals and hard disks was their forte.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"