Comment by flyinghamster

Eeeeeep. I was lucky that my big CS courses were done on a Sequent Balance 8000 equipped with six NS32032 CPUs and room for six more. Yup, SMP in the mid-1980s. That machine positively flew on loads that would bring the neighboring Pyramid 90x to its knees.

I had an account on a 3B20, and it did not impress me in the least, but the 3B2/400 boxes in one lab were pretty reasonable for being small systems. What a shame that the WE32000 didn't get any traction.

Before I went down to UIUC, the junior college had a Prime 650, and all compile jobs were run through a queue precisely to avoid having the machine get crushed.