Computing Power Used to Be Measured in 'Kilo-Girls'
The earliest computers were human. And, more often than not, female.
They talk about the unit but don't translate it into computing power.
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How much is a kilo-girl?
- Thread starter Loren Pechtel
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They talk about the unit but don't translate it into computing power.
bilby
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According to https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/national-security-science/2020-winter/computing-on-the-mesa/,
According to: https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/02/15/eniac-at-75-celebrating-the-worlds-first-supercomputer/,
So 20 girl hours was 30 x 400 = 12,000 FLOPS, making one girl hour 12.000/20 = 600 FLOPS, so one girl was calculating at 600/3,600 per second, or 0.1667 FLOPS (or one floating point operation every six seconds), making a kilo-girl somewhere around 167 FLOPS. Obviously the hardware was highly variable in its speed at a given level of accuracy, so a given team of computers could easily have been anywhere between 150 and 200 FLOPS per kilo-girl.
One floating point calculation every six seconds, averaged over an eight hour shift, with error checking and correction included, is a pretty impressive feat.
According to: https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/02/15/eniac-at-75-celebrating-the-worlds-first-supercomputer/,
So 20 girl hours was 30 x 400 = 12,000 FLOPS, making one girl hour 12.000/20 = 600 FLOPS, so one girl was calculating at 600/3,600 per second, or 0.1667 FLOPS (or one floating point operation every six seconds), making a kilo-girl somewhere around 167 FLOPS. Obviously the hardware was highly variable in its speed at a given level of accuracy, so a given team of computers could easily have been anywhere between 150 and 200 FLOPS per kilo-girl.
One floating point calculation every six seconds, averaged over an eight hour shift, with error checking and correction included, is a pretty impressive feat.
bilby
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If you haven't read Sean McMullen's Souls in the Great Machine, then you really should. One of the central 'characters' in this book (which is part one of the excellent 'Greatwinter' trilogy) is the Calculor, a computer built out of human slaves, in a post apocalyptic Earthbound society in which any attempt to use electricity or mechanical devices, on a moderate to large scale, results in immediate annihilation by surviving automated orbital battle-stations.
Cheerful Charlie
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When the English admiralty started compiling navigation information into tables, most of the necessary calculations were done by women. Thousands of women in Great Britain worked in their spare time for money. Eventually, with Harrison's excellent naval chronometers and these tables, English navigators could navigate anywhere on the globe with accuracy of 7 nautical miles.
Way more powerful than I thought. Still, though, I have in front of me a planet's worth of computing.