Vax 11/780 performance vs Sun 4/280 performance

[Barry Shein]

Dennis Ritchie points out that his Cray observes disk I/O speeds that
compare favorably to those claimed for large IBM mainframes, thus in
contrast to my claim Crays may indeed be the "Crays" of I/O.

I think the proper question is sort/merging a disk farm and doing 1000
transactions/sec or more while keeping 8 or 12 tapes turning at or
near their rated 200 ips, not pushing bits thru a single channel (if
we're talking Crays then we're talking 3090's.)

If the Cray can keep pumping the I/O under those conditions (typical
job stream for a JC Penney's or Mastercard) then we all better short
IBM. Software or price would be no object if the Cray could do it
better (and more reliably, I guess that *is* an issue, but let's skip
that for now.)

Then again, who knows? Old beliefs die hard, far be it for me to
defend the Itsy Bitsy Machine company.

Mayhaps the Amdahl crew can provide some appropriate viciousness at
this point :-) Oh, please do!

	-Barry Shein, Boston University