For those into retro computing here is a great bit of nostalgia, a 1979 Popular Science review of Seymour Cray‘s Cray-1 SuperComputer.

Incredible Cray-1 cruises at 80 million operations a second

At US $8,000,000 that was $100K per MIP, or 17 MegaFlops per US$1M (( it was rated around 250 MFlops, but that was with very tuned code, usually it could do about 136 Mflops according to the Wikipedia article )). 🙂

As the introduction to the blog post says, “a Pentium 4 2.8ghz can hit about 2.5 GFLOP/s“, or just under 20 times the speed. For some reason I’m reminded of Ozymandias.