I wanna do some joins on a half gigabyte dataset that I’ve set up, but with my 200 MHz Pentium I’d be sitting around all day hearing the disk grind and watching the red light flash. I’m analyzing 26 million first names, the first name of every man, woman, and child in the United Kingdom in 1881. I’ve worked with some smaller databases; names of 7000 cotton workers in Manchester in 1818 and another 1300 names from 1642 when all adult males were required to indicate whether they supported the King and his religion. But these databases aren’t big enough to say much other than that John, Richard, and William are common male names, and about 20% of women were named Mary in early 19’th century England. I need more computing power if I’m going to be able to figure out why people call themselves by certain names. I’ve seen these monster machines with quad Pentium processors, 500 Mhz each and a gig of RAM. Man I’d love to get my hands on one of those machines. It’d standardize 26 million names faster than you can say “join Maggie, Molly and Polly with Margaret, and make Jonathon and Jonny types of Johns.” Hey, by the way, what’s your name? Do you want to know how many people had your name in Britain in 1881?