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From: iyengar@grad1.cis.upenn.edu (Anand Iyengar)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Evans and Sutherland quits the superbusiness
Message-ID: <17305@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 24 Nov 89 07:51:16 GMT
References: <1128@m3.mfci.UUCP> <1989Nov22.175128.24910@ico.isc.com> <3893@scolex.sco.COM> <39361@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
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Reply-To: iyengar@grad1.cis.upenn.edu.UUCP (Anand Iyengar)
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In article <39361@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> brooks@maddog.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks) writes:
>No one needs a computer of any performance level on his desk.  What one
>needs is a modern windowing terminal on a desk, connected to the
>computer in the computer room with a connection of suitable bandwidth to
>handle the drawing on the screen.
	Interesting statement.  

	I'm running off of an X term now, and while it's not bad, it's not
trouble free.  If the serving host, the network, or the terminal itself
are down, I can't use it work get work done.  If I have a high-performance
micro with a reasonable drive, I only crash when the local machine/site
has problems (let's not argue NFS;  that's somewhere in between, depending
on how much you mount and keep locally. Diskless clients have many of the
same problems as windowing terminals).  

	Also, performance of the Xterm decreases with loading of the central
host, and network.  It's not blazingly fast in itself, either.  Doing anything
really "graphical" on it bogs it down or crashes it.  Forget animation or
really neatsy stuff.  Maybe one could put a faster CPU, and internal bus in
it to get the graphics to go fast.  But then why not just go the extra 5 yards,
and drop some more RAM and a drive on it, and make it a real-live computer?  

>The Killer Micros and striped disk farm belong in the computer room where fan
>noise and heat does not bother anyone.
	Why?  I hate the noise as much as anyone, but why is it bad to
have a high-performance computer on your desk?  Drop a net link to it, and
people can log in to it from about anywhere.  

>A Killer Micro on ones desk is just a waste of a Killer Micro, along with
>a uselessly small main memory size.  The utilization of such a machine is so
>low it is hard to measure reliably.
	It is and it isn't.  Price/performance doesn't scale linearly.  It's
not clear that a big mainframe is lots (your mileage will vary) better than
a number of micros.  There are still some things that I can't do on a
mainframe that I can do on a micro, such as crash it.  Because we have a
number of small boxes around people can just connect to a different
one for a while, and it's not a problem.  

>In article <3893@scolex.sco.COM> seanf@sco.COM (Sean Fagan) writes:
>>K.M.'s, however, tend to be unix varients (or, deity help us all, DOS).
>>This is not a terribly robust OS, nor a terribly quick one (asynchronous I/O
>>would be really nice; there are some other things that could be useful).
	Agreed, but people are band-aiding as they go, and it's wide-spread
enough that it will probably be here a while.  

>Killer Micros will soon dominate the world of computing, UNIX already does.
>DOS users are not computing, but saying just what they are doing is not
>appropriate for public consumption.
	In every DOS user is a potential UNIX user.  You might not like DOS,
but that doesn't make it evil.  Funny;  IBM use to think the same thing...

							Anand.  
--
"I've got more important things to waste my time on."
{arpa | bit}net: iyengar@eniac.seas.upenn.edu
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