[R] SAS and R on multiple operating systems

Peter Dalgaard pdalgd at gmail.com
Tue Apr 6 08:38:02 CEST 2010


Douglas Bates wrote:
> The first VAX at our university, a VAX-11/780, was allegedly a "1
> MIPS" machine but it was pretty difficult to get it to do a million of
> any instruction in one second.  I eventually succeeded because it had
> a special instruction for decrement and branch on zero so if you
> loaded a register with 100000 and put it in a tight loop of that one
> instruction, it was able to count from 100000 down to zero within a
> second.  When I bought the second Vax on the campus, a less powerful
> Vax-11/750, I was considered extravagant because I equipped it with a
> *second* megabyte of memory (at a cost of about $9000).

You will probably remember the unfortunate name-collision with an
industrial strength vacuum cleaner. The latter alledgedly had a large
advertising campaign with the slogan "Nothing sucks like a VAX".

-- 
Peter Dalgaard
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com



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