> Even when it was available, you only got an allotment of it and had to figure out how to do everything you wanted within that allotment.
IIRC computing primes was a popular way to test hardware; it’s fairly easy to compare results between machines, and both having a faster CPU, more CPUs and having more memory (simple example: if you do trial division, you can keep a larger table of ‘small’ primes around to quickly weed out most integers)) will speed up computations.
It then sort-of became a marketing goal to beat your competitors, so cleverer and cleverer algorithms were developed.
Because of that, those records had less trouble with resource allotments.
IIRC computing primes was a popular way to test hardware; it’s fairly easy to compare results between machines, and both having a faster CPU, more CPUs and having more memory (simple example: if you do trial division, you can keep a larger table of ‘small’ primes around to quickly weed out most integers)) will speed up computations.
It then sort-of became a marketing goal to beat your competitors, so cleverer and cleverer algorithms were developed.
Because of that, those records had less trouble with resource allotments.