Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!sgi!karsh@trifolium.esd.sgi.com
From: karsh@trifolium.esd.sgi.com (Bruce Karsh)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Multi-tasking, and immunology (was Macintosh OS)
Message-ID: <62369@sgi.sgi.com>
Date: 17 Jun 90 23:01:31 GMT
References: <8767@odin.corp.sgi.com> <jdarcy.644899889@zelig> <369@three.MV.COM> <682@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ>
Sender: karsh@trifolium.esd.sgi.com
Reply-To: karsh@trifolium.sgi.com (Bruce Karsh)
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 27

In article <682@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> ian@sibyl.OZ (Ian Dall) writes:

>I guess this discussion only has a place in comp.arch *if* it
>influences the requirements on the hardware.

This is comp.arch, not comp.hardware.  The software architecture of a
computer system seems to be a lot more important to computer users than
the hardware architecture.

I think we need a lot more discussion of software architecture.  Certainly
something is wrong with present ideas of how system software should be
architected.  Unix machines and their ilk are expensive and not very
popular (except with programmers).  Trying to get work done on them is
painfully slow.  There is practically no good end-user software available.
It's been this way for nearly twenty years.  If Unix is the present idea
of how system software should be architected, then clearly something is very
wrong.

From the recent traffic on this newsgroup, it looks like the Mac-style
very small architectures are not well received by programmers.
However, they have been very well received by their users though.  If
the modern view of software architecture can't account for the success
of this kind of architecture, then there's something very wrong with the
modern view.

			Bruce Karsh
			karsh@sgi.com