Comment by qubex

I was born in 1981 and my first computer was an Andrea’s 1512 IBM XT clone. I then had a 386SX-16 in 1991 and a 486DX2-66 in 1994.

Anyway a while ago I was reading an article authored by a guy who lived through the same era as I grew up laughing at modern developers whom he had asked to size a machine to add all the integers from 1 to 100. Setting aside that 7 year old Gauss found the closed form of that sum (the triangular number formula) in about ten minutes and got the correct result of 5050 without any of the arithmetic busywork, it’s totally insane what some of the answers involved… with some involving the terms “Big Data” (yes, it was that era of hype, before “Crypto” and “AI”) and some even (allegedly) mentioning ‘clusters’. I really wish I could find you a link.