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Re:A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system by MichaelZuo on Saturday November 06, 2021 @06:04PM (#29134235)
I wonder how many transactions per second the same amount of money, inflation adjusted, can buy nowadays?
Re:A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system by jeroenhd on Saturday November 06, 2021 @08:17PM (#29135164)
I can't find exact pricing info, but here's some guesstimations:

According to [0], the most recent UNIVAC cost about $1,932,000 for the base model (for purchase) or $33,060 for rent. In today's money, that's $18,337,955.71 or $313,795.45 respectively according to [1]. That's not really the UNIVAC used today (it was 7 years old by then) but I can't find pricing for the UNIVAC File Computer in 1958 so this will have to do.

Assuming the system was rented (much cheaper) and going by OVH pricing (the first hoster I could find, usually much cheaper than the big lads like Google or Amazon), this will get you about $313,795.45/$994.50 = 315 dual AMD Epyc 7402 dedicated servers.

According to [3], the UNIVAC 1105 ran about 20k operations per second. Assuming the system doesn't use floats, each AMD chip can run about 296,704 million operations per second. Ignoring overhead, that means the entire network would be able to run roughly 186.8 billion integer ops/sec.

With the expected performance of 1 to 1.5 transaction per second (let's use 1 here, for ease) for the 20k number, that would mean a similar system running on our AMD super cluster would be able to run about 9.340.000 transactions per second.

This is all rough guesswork ignoring a lot of real-life factors (like overhead, bulk pricing, price overhead of not running the servers in your own DC, network/storage latency, modern mainframes, vector instructions, etc.) but I think it shows how far general computing has come (at least 9 million times as fast for about the same price!).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_1105 [1]: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1958?amount=33060 [2]: https://books.google.com/books?id=KFAUAQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA87&ots=... [3]: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+EPYC+7402&id=37...

Re:A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system by chiph on Saturday November 06, 2021 @08:42PM (#29135316)
Rent vs. buy back then is a lot tougher decision than it is now - If you turned your old rental unit in for the latest model because it was significantly faster, chances were you would have to rewrite all your software.

Which was the big advantage of the IBM System 360 - the same software would run (+/-) on all the models of the line.