As we noted in the previous post about performance, there are some conflicting performance claims about these systems, depending on where you look. Since the last post was more popular than expected, we’ve decided to do a short follow-up, this time relying on details from various Honeywell sales documents, such as the Series 6000 Summary Description (1971) and Honeywell Large Systems Product Guide (1984).
This post aims to show how the performance of systems implementing the 600/6000-series mainframe architecture evolved across hardware generations — and where the DPS8M Simulator fits in. It is not intended as an exhaustive reference for all models, instead focusing on the four generations of machines that ran the Multics operating system.
Although exact details are often unclear (and we don’t have original systems available to run new benchmarks), we can present the graphic above, representing the various systems that were used for running Multics, with a very high level of confidence.
