Comment by fuzztester

I once visited the office of a scientist at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, India, where they had an Unix SMP RISC (2 MIPS CPUs) computer, IIRC, supplied by the company where I worked. He said some of his programs took a week to run on that beast (i.e. beast for that period) and then spat out one or just a few numbers as the result. :) I think the programs were in Fortran or C. That fairly expensive computer was used by only him. I was a bit in awe of that. It was a central government laboratory, huge campus, only one of its kind in the country, so I guess they had a good amount of funding.

Sometimes I think I should have gone into scientific computing. It seems pretty interesting.