Now that MIPS are largely discredited as a measure of business computer performance, manufacturers are casting around for another benchmark, and IBM has come up with Ramp-C, a measure of transactions per hour with a typical business mix: unfortunately, as far as IBM is concerned, Ramp-C is as proprietary as the Micro Channel bus, and won’t even licence the thing, simply using it internally and giving its salespeople results that seem to make its machines look suspiciously good to its arch-rival DEC; the Maynard minimaker claims that in the benchmark, IBM set the VAX computers up with communications just 1% as fast as the lines to the IBM computers, whereas, it claims, its users typically set up lines 10 times as fast as those used by IBM.
