bentley is always worth reading
it's interesting to reflect that the 'supercomputer' he cites is a hundred megaflops, about the same as a pentium pro in theory (though the super didn't have a cache to slow it down, so it was typically faster by over an order of magnitude.) i was using a pentium pro at the office when i first read this article. now my cellphone can manage tens of gigaflops if not hundreds
the bob martin mentioned is http://www.ewaygroup.com/Bob-bio.html, not the better-known ignorant blowhard