[inforoots] Fwd: The IBM 7090 & Yacht Handicapping

[Michael Blasgen]

 Quote:

 IBM had been very generous to MIT in the fifties and sixties, donating its
biggest scientific computers. When a new top of the line 36-bit scientific
machine came out, MIT expected to get one. In the early sixties, the deal
was that MIT got one 8-hour shift, all the other New England colleges and
universities got a shift, and the third shift was available to IBM for its
own use. One use IBM made of it was yacht handicapping: the president of IBM
raced big yachts on Long Island Sound, and these boats were assigned
handicap points by a complicated formula. There was a special job deck kept
at the MIT Computation Center, and if a request came in to run it, operators
were to stop whatever was running on the machine and do the yacht
handicapping job immediately.

http://www.multicians.org/thvv/7094.html?1

 As they say, in addition to being a sequence of trade-offs, life is also a
matter of priorities.
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