>Does anyone happen to know how many message sends per second one could get on a Dorado, or on any of these early machines?  Or the numbers from any of the standard benchmarks that one could run today?
>
>I was just wondering how many (decimal) orders of magnitude we have gained since those days, not so very long ago ...

The Dorado was quite a machine for a personal computer -- the size of a small refrigerator and packing ECL circuitry with a micro cycle time of 25 nanoseconds.  We predicted that it would get us under a microsecond per bytecode, and it did -- just.  I don't remember the send speed, but it should have scaled pretty much as now, relative to the bytecode speed, which would put it around 40K sends per second.

These speeds are roughly 1/50th the speed of my Mac Powerbook.  As I recall, the size of main memory was also around 1/50th what I have now, and the disk space around 1/1000th what one expects in a decent laptop today.

... and we were breathless in the face of such performance ;-)

	- Dan