I was explaining to my Dad the other day the concept of data CDs with MP3s on. "So why didn't they do CDs like that to start with?", he asked.

Well, I said, at the time the audio CD was first announced, the amount of computing power needed to decode MP3 in real-time would fill a room.

But that set me thinking: what sort of computer could you have played an MP3 on in 1980, if MP3 had been invented that long ago? Say MP3 decoding needs about 40 MIPS. A Cray-1 could do it, but no Vax of the time could. Were there mainframes that could do it? What was the first computer powerful enough to decode an MP3? When was the first time the world's total computing power exceeded 40 MIPS?

Peter