A classic display of latency vs bandwidth.  The DEC box wins on latency but the pi wins on bandwidth, for large enough tasks, anyway.<p>A 2040 was a PDP-10 with a 30 MHz KL processor running around 30 MIPS and TOPS-20 (the source of the &quot;20&quot; in the name) a quarter century ago.<p>30e6 * 60 * 24 * 365 * 25 = about 4 e 14 instructions.<p>I can&#x27;t get a straight answer but hundreds of MIPS sounds reasonable for a pi zero.<p>4e14 &#x2F; 500e6 &#x2F; 60 &#x2F; 24 &#x2F; 365 = about a year and a half<p>So sometime in 2017 a pi zero would finally catch up to a DECSystem-2040 which had a quarter century head start.  Of course the 2040 has been continuously producing intermediate results for the first 25 years of the &quot;race&quot; while the pi output no results at all having not being invented yet.  Also after 27 or so years the pi will somewhat surpass the 2040.<p>Also the IO bandwidth and scalability of old mainframes usually puts newer hardware to shame.  &quot;My calculator has more power than a 1960s NASA mainframe that sent men to the moon&quot; &quot;Oh so you&#x27;re saying you&#x27;ve been to Mars, then?&quot;<p>On one hand, 4e14 instructions executed would have been enough to run entire civilizations, some years ago.  On the other hand, its not enough to boot modern Windows, although despite the difficulty is none the less not accomplishing anything in the real world.