From The Hunt for Red October (1984):
During her last overhaul, the Dallas had received a very special toy to go with her BQQ-5 sonar system. Called the BC-10, it was the most powerful computer yet installed aboard a submarine. Though only about the size of a business desk, it cost over five million dollars and ran at eighty million operations per second.Emphasis mine.
Twenty years and 13 or so cycles through Moore's law later, this kind of massive computing power comes in a rather more convenient package.
The Zire, of course, is huge, expensive, and slow.
http://www.gumstix.com/
:)
Anybody here know what a KIM-1 is(was)? IIRC it's 1978 or so vintage...