[TriLUG] Comparing a Univac 1105 with today's PC

[Judy Hallman]

The UNC Computation Center was dedicated in March 1960. We're working on 
some materials celebrating 50 years of computing on campus. The 
description of UNC's Univac contained:
Memory Capacity
Core (fast:  access time .000008 second) 8,192 words
Drum (slow:  access time .017 second) 32,000 words

With help from Google, I have:

The Univac 1105 at UNC-Chapel Hill had 8,192 36-bit "words," each of 
which could be used to store an integer, floating point number, or 6 
characters. In today's measure, its memory capacity was less than 50 
kilobytes.

It took .000008 seconds between initiation of a call for data from the 
Univac's core memory and delivery of the data (access time). Access 
speeds today are about 40 nanoseconds (.000000040 seconds).

Auxiliary storage was a magnetic drum which stored 32,000 words with 
access time of .017 second. The average access time of today's typical 
hard drive is roughly 5.6 milliseconds (.0056 seconds).

Does this look correct? Can you improve it?

Judy Hallman (UNC Class of '59)