JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Back in the day, the Postscript printers could be substantially more powerful than the workstations the cash-strapped computer department would provide for the students.
Yes. At the University of Michigan we were working either on the IBM 3090 mainframe or on sickly little HP 3000 workstations. The massive Postscript page printer, however, could crank out fully-rendered PS print jobs at the rate of about two pages per second. Sure, it was the size of a small car, but it was dang powerful.
...someone decided to test it by generating a 4000x4000 matrix ... and computing its inverse. The admin was not amused.
That's a small test job by my standards. The HPC solutions I design, provide, and use in computational engineering have solved matrices in up to 1017 unknowns. In case you're wondering, it was a complete CSD model for a large-scale oceangoing vessel.
