Although the game was not the first to simulate snooker (or pool) in 3D, it made full use of the processing power and graphics capabilities of 16-bit home computers and was praised for its then ground-breaking realism and easy-to-use interface.
3M was a goal first proposed in the early 1980s by Raj Reddy and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a minimum specification for academic/technical workstations: at least a megabyte of memory, a megapixel display and a million instructions per second (MIPS) processing power.
Determine the effective CPI, MIPS rate, and execution time for this program.
The HETE-2 spacecraft currently uses 4× T805 transputers and 8× DSP56001 yielding about 100 MIPS of performance.
The University of Kent system went live in December 1979, and ran on the least powerful machine in the ICL 2900 range - an ICL 2960, with 2MB of memory, executing about 290k instructions per second.
The Atlas was a joint venture between Ferranti and the Manchester University and was designed to operate at processing speeds approaching one microsecond per instruction, about one million instructions per second.