Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9

Re:Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9 by retrac on Saturday July 31, 2021 @10:07PM (#28023148)

Since you mention EC, it uses floating point. Good ol' FLOPS is not a wholly useless metric there. The first commercial processor sold with a floating point unit integrated was the 486 in 1989. Some rough, unsourced numbers:

    1984 - Cray X-MP (expensive!)         800 MFLOPS  
    1989 - Intel 486 @ 33 MHz             3 
    1993 - Pentium @ 60 MHz               10
    1997 - Pentium II @ 233 MHz           200
    2000 - Pentium III @ 1000 MHz         2000
    2004 - Pentium 4 @ 2800 MHz           5650 
    2007 - Core Quad @ 2400 MHz           38400 
    2009 - Core i7-950 @ 3100 MHz         92820
    2013 - Apple A7 (smartphone)          115000
    2020 - Apple M1                       2844000

A FP calculation that takes 1 second on an Apple M1 will take 11 hours on the original Pentium, approximately. Hope that gives some perspective.

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Re:Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9 by blibble on Saturday July 31, 2021 @10:18PM (#28023221)

even if it's 15000 times slower than my 2014 laptop (which it isn't): the ECDH operation still takes under a second

and that's the expensive operation (done once per connection)

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Re:Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9 by retrac on Saturday July 31, 2021 @11:38PM (#28023606)

I am making the same mistake that the other poster did, in assuming too much background familiarity. Those are 90s chips. This software runs on machines from the late 1980s. The trend scales further back as it does forward. Five years is always a long time in computer performance.

The 486, the slowest chip on my list blasts the early Macs (which this software runs on) out of the water by 100x. I went and researched it and the the 68882 FPU at 25 MHz is about 0.25 MFLOPS: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/motorola/68k-chips-faq/

Stunning, but that is the difference between 1985 and 1989 technology.

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Re:Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9 by dev_tty01 on Sunday August 01, 2021 @12:39AM (#28023831)

The first Macs were 8 MHz 68000 chips. The GUI was still very responsive. The menus popped down and Quickdraw (the graphics library) properly handled arbitrarily shaped overlapping windows. There was a demo with a round window and windows in the background updated perfectly. Bill Atkinson invented the Regions data structure (and the rest of Quickdraw) that allowed among other things, background windows graphics calls to be clipped to arbitrary combinations of foreground windows super efficiently. Atkinson is one of the greats.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

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Re:Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9 by blibble on Saturday July 31, 2021 @11:44PM (#28023629)

> I am making the same mistake that the other poster did, in assuming too much background familiarity. Those are 90s chips. This software runs on machines from the late 1980s. The trend scales further back as it does forward.

my point was on interactive use (i.e. using AES or ChaCha)

you are the one that diverted the topic towards RSA-4096 (which no-one uses), moving the goalposts (twice)

(and yes, I saw the deleted post)

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Re:Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9 by retrac on Saturday July 31, 2021 @11:48PM (#28023649)

Yep. AES will run fine on any of these machines. These machines are in practice still sort of usable with SSH, with some patience for login depending on protocol.

I deleted the post because I was a bit too aggressive, but apparently the damage was done. I apologize for lecturing you like a prat.

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