William Henry Dana – “Two Years Before the Mast” – An excellent book describing what it was like to be a sailor in the days just before steam, there’s plenty of climbing the rigging in a sleet storm, while trying to round Cape Horn. – but when they got to California, the weather was a lot nicer. Dana later went on to be a lawyer fighting for sailor’s rights.
Silicon valley wasn’t very developed when Dana was doing his shipboard duties, and there weren’t any disk drives at the time. They *did*, however, have parallel cluster computing – rooms full of computers grinding out navigation tables. And I suppose they were commodity computers, using commodity interconnects (of the day), so could they fairly be called a Beowulf. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/the-women-behind-the-jet-propulsion-laboratory/482847/ describes a 1953 version of the same. From: Beowulf <beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org> on behalf of "beowulf@beowulf.org" <Beowulf@beowulf.org> Reply-To: John Hearns <hear...@googlemail.com> Date: Friday, July 27, 2018 at 1:03 AM To: Jörg Saßmannshausen <sassy-w...@sassy.formativ.net> Cc: "beowulf@beowulf.org" <Beowulf@beowulf.org> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Lustre Upgrades Jörg, then the days of the Tea Clipper Races should be revived. We have just the ship for it already. Powered by green energy, and built in Scotland of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutty_Sark Just fill her hold with hard drives and set sail. Aaar me hearties. I can just see HPC types being made to climb the rigging in a gale...
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