I'm patient, but when you have a heavily loaded VAX-11/780 (I think
this was before the host apple.com was upgraded to a VAX-8650)
doing netnews, where even the highly optimized "compress" program
beats on the CPU, and a Cray X/MP-48 just sitting there across the
LAN ...
So, I set up a TCP "compression service" set up on the Cray (bits
go in, compressed bits come out; inetd makes this easy and UniCOS
came with the "compress") and blasted netnews batches across the
10Mb/s Ethernet from the VAX and captured the results for transmission
to Apple's UUCP-based netnews neighbors.
It was lots faster that way and it took a large load off the VAX.
Unfortunately, I had to discontinue the practice when some of my
netnews neighbors complained of corrupted batches; it seems that
there were some subtle 32 bit assumptions in compress that I didn't
have the time to track down. Still, it was fun to play with a
supercomputer at a place where they believed in interactive computing,
and didn't charge for CPU time.
Then there was the time I ported pathalias to the Cray ...
Erik <fair(_at_)clock(_dot_)org>
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