Stan writes:

>   In the past, I've run CPU-intensive programs for a day or so,
>   doing various and sundry things (e.g., testing hash code).
>
>   So, it occurred to me to wonder: how long has the longest
>   single-task program taken on a 3000?

I've also run multi-day tests of algorithms, but I don't remember any
specific run times.

The longest single task that did something other than testing was a
program that computed several different concordances of the Brown Corpus,
a collection of 500 pieces of English prose from 30 or so genres, with a
total of 1,000,000 words. The program used tape as an intermediate medium
since it was running on a Series III with one 50MB disc drive. It ran for
about four days, which included a weekend. We were doing research on a
new full-text approximate-match search algorithm.

Of course, the same task could be completed on an average-configuration
machine today in a few minutes, so I'm not sure how meaningful the
comparison might be.

-- Bruce


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