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Comment by Harvesterify | Hacker News Reader

This is apparently greatly over-hyped (or a complete lie, depending on your interpretation) :

https://mobile.twitter.com/mainframed767/status/125801882682...

And the login screen is just taken from the manual for the MVS TK-4 system: https://mobile.twitter.com/mainframed767/status/125802863861...

So the pictures are: a stock photo of a mainframe, a stock photo of a Raspberry Pi, and a cropped screenshot from an MVS installation manual. Looking at OP's other tweets he appears to be a pretty shamelessly self-promoting "thought leader" type so I would be pretty unsurprised if it's bullshit.

It's possible the original tweet poster was running a much newer mainframe OS on his Hercules emulator, but didn't want to say it directly, since he might get a license bill for that.

"7 times faster than System/370" is an odd claim though. There's several models and 19 years of upgrades.

System/370 ended in the eighties I think? Maybe it is reasonable to be 7 times faster than the fastest System/370.

The fastest S/370 (pre-S/390) machine in the line was, I think, the 3090; these were multiprocessors, but a single processor had a 69 MhZ clock rate. Even if you assume it retired one instruction per cycle (and I'm not at all sure it did), it wouldn't be a shock for Hercules on an RPi to manage that.

Aside: “Soldier of Fortran” is a great user ID!

This guy had a reputation when I frequented Quora of being a bit full of shit, but convincing.

The counter tweet isn't particularly levelheaded either. 5 years to compile something on a platform that has a four 1.5Ghz cores? Listing a bunch of software that the original code may or may not need?

It's been a while since I went to Twitter, though. Honestly HTML 1.0 with blink and construction gifs has less information pollution, once all the bad memes, youtube channel spam, and bad one-line retweets spill onto the screen.

> four 1.5Ghz cores

The Pi Zero is actually only a single-core 1GHz board with 512mb RAM. It's fairly slow compared to the rest of the lineup. I couldn't even upgrade my Pi 2 to a Zero in a few of my projects.

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