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Path: utzoo!linus!wivax!decvax!cca!charlie
From: charlie@cca.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: Re: Artificially Different Products
Message-ID: <5064@cca.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 1-Jul-83 18:22:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: cca.5064
Posted: Fri Jul  1 18:22:10 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 2-Jul-83 01:23:22 EDT
Lines: 20

I have two great tales:

It is well known that many computer vendors will sell different
processor models which are software compatable but run at different
speeds which are actually the same hardware with the clock reset.
Honeywell in the early 1970's carried this to a further extreme.
Processor models 66/07, 66/17, and 66/27 were called gearshift machines.
They ran "more competitively" when running time-sharing than when
running batch.  This is because in the batch world, Honeywell was
competing with IBM while in timesharing they were competing with DEC.
IBM did not offer as good a price/performance as DEC.  This had to have
been implemented by placing the speed of the CPU under *software*
control.  The practice was discontinued, either because IBM got more
competitive or too many hackers figured out how to patch the OS.

A commercial service bureau (reportedly GE, but I'm not certain) had two
compatible FORTRAN compilers.  A checkout and an optimizer.  Compiling
with the optimizing compiler took three times as long, but the resulting
code ran 40% faster.  Exactly three times as long and exactly 40%
faster.  Hmmm...