Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!hellgate.utah.edu!uplherc!wicat!sarek!gsarff
From: gsarff@sarek.UUCP (Gary Sarff)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Differentiation and Compatibility (Was: Memory utilization ... )
Message-ID: <00312@sarek.UUCP>
Date: 22 Sep 89 03:13:49 GMT
References: <1114@aber-cs.UUCP> <278@baird.cs.strath.ac.uk> <2089@uceng.UC.EDU> <45369@bbn.COM> <2118@uceng.UC.EDU>
Organization: Programmers in Exile
Lines: 45

In article <2118@uceng.UC.EDU>, dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes:
>In article <45369@bbn.COM>, slackey@bbn.com (Stan Lackey) writes:
>> In article <2108@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes:
>> >Agreed. But why can't the hardware be tuned to run UNIX? 
>> 
>> I just knew you were going to say that!
>
>And, recursively, I just knew you knew, etc., >STACK OVERFLOW< :-)
>
>> Actually, it looks to me like
>> a lot of the newer RISC's are being made for C and UNIX.
>
>A trend I heartily applaud. The pace of hardware advance is so fast that
>vendors lose their market window if they try to go too proprietary with
>RISC. And with the massive surges in price/performance we're seeing with
>RISC, watch out for some serious erosion among the proprietary holdouts
>(but you already knew that...).
>
I don't applaud it, it seems like stagnation to me.  Just as in the PC
DOS world, yes dos is "standard", yes it has lots of programs, but also,
it is an inferior operating system, piece of hardware.  UNIX is not the
most perfect, wonderful operating system achievable by man such that we
should stop looking for anything new, and yet that is where the industry
seems to be headed.  UNIX has many flaws, but since it is becoming
a "standard" no one dares to fix them, the same old buggy ugly utilities,
the same kludgy interfaces to the kernel, poor user administration utils,
poor security, etc. year after year.  There are  "proprietary" OS's that
have some good ideas that UNIX users could benefit from, just because
something is stamped with the term proprietary doesn't mean it is bad,
though that is more and more becoming the perception as the herd stampedes,
(or is stampeded) towards UNIX/C.  If processors become optimized only for
UNIX/C, what happens if someone comes up with some idea, or something they
want to research, and it is more difficult/slower/ costlier to test because
of this process?  Say some new language paradigm that doesn't fit well into
the C mold because the risc designers said, "well C doesn't use this so we
won't make machine instructions/facilities to do it"  Or some new OS
design concept.  It looks like instead of new and innovative things, we are
just going to get faster ways to run incomprehensible awk and sed scripts.
This has strayed from the architecture subject, but ultimately the
hardware's whole purpose is to run software people's projects.


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