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From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: (Free) book on the Amoeba distributed system available
Message-ID: <6106@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 23 Mar 90 08:52:41 GMT
References: <6067@star.cs.vu.nl> <2604@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca>
Sender: news@cs.vu.nl
Organization: Fac. Wiskunde & Informatica, VU, Amsterdam
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In article <2604@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca> utility@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ronald BODKIN) writes:
>Sounds like Amoeba is quite close to QNX.  QNX also has the virtual machine,
>the same kernal design, the same high-speed features.  And QNX has years
>of a good track record.
>	Ron


I thought QNX was basically a UNIX-clone.  You log into one specific machine
and work there, with access to others via rlogin and explicit file motion.
Correct me if I am wrong.  

In Amoeba you just log in.  When you say the equivalent of ls -l, you see
a bunch of files.  Some might be in your machine room, and the rest might
be spread over a dozen sites in as many countries.  You can't even tell
where they are unless you look hard.  When you start make, it runs all
the compilations on as many processors as it can find, in parallel.  This
is what I mean by a distributed system--there is no concept of a home machine
where work is done by default.  There is just a big pool of resources which
the system allocates automatically.  Is QNX like that?

Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)