Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!ncar!ico!ism780c!randvax!news
From: edhall@rand.org (Ed Hall)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: BEYOND DOS ? WHAT NEXT !
Summary: Try a *real* version of UNIX :-)
Message-ID: <1989Nov4.185710.809@rand.org>
Date: 4 Nov 89 18:57:10 GMT
References: <13110@s.ms.uky.edu>
Sender: news@rand.org
Reply-To: edhall@rand.org (Ed Hall)
Organization: The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA
Lines: 24

In article <13110@s.ms.uky.edu> munish@ms.uky.edu (Munish Mehra) writes:
>I recently installed Unix (Microport) on a 20 MHz (Non Caching) Compaq
>386 portable. It has a 100 MB 28 ms HardDisk and 3 MB of 80 ns RAM.
>It was ridiculously SLOW. ls takes 5 to 10 seconds. hello world in C
>took over half a minute to compile (without errors), on introducing an
>error it took around a minute before giving the error message.
>I know this was not the best combination of flavour of Unix and
>operating system, but my guess is that even a 25 MHz Caching 386 with
>enough RAM and a 16.5 ms ESDI wouldn't be as fast as DOS.

I have a 25MHz uncaching no-name 386 with a 61ms, 65MB disk drive
(temporary) and only 2MB of RAM (also a temporary restriction).
When I read this message (dialed in via the ``cu'' program) I popped
up another virtual terminal and wrote and compiled a ``hello world''
program.  It compiled to an a.out in six seconds (clock time).
Adding an extra closing brace yielded an error message in about one
second.

My system?  Interactive's 386/ix, a flavor of UNIX System V 3.2,
configured right out of the box.  Don't judge all UNIX's from the
abomination you tried.

		-Ed Hall
		edhall@rand.org