> Remember, we're talking English, and where I come from, "commercial" > is anything that involves businesses making money. > Buildings cost millions of dollars and are sold commercially, but the engineering of them is considered "scientific" computing for a lot of the reasons we have discussed and more.
Typically "scientific" computing also is more heavily reliant on floating point arithmetic, and therefore floating point processors are more prevalent that in "commercial" computing. In early Unix systems, there was very, very little that was done with floating point, particularly in the operating system itself, since a lot of systems did not have floating point accelerators. Early Unix systems were aimed toward text processing (the first PDP-11 to run "Unix" was funded by Bell Lab's Law department so they could work on legal briefs). This needed very little floating point processing. Later on, as Unix moved more into the more scientific space it developed needs for floating point work, and support of floating point accelerators. md _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/