Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!aries!mcdonald From: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Multi-tasking, and immunology (was Macintosh OS) Message-ID: <1990Jun18.020706.10385@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 18 Jun 90 02:07:06 GMT References: <8767@odin.corp.sgi.com> <369@three.MV.COM> <682@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> <62369@sgi.sgi.com> Sender: usenet@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News) Reply-To: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) Organization: School of Chemical Sciences, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Lines: 38 In article <62369@sgi.sgi.com> karsh@trifolium.sgi.com (Bruce Karsh) writes: > >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. An excellent statement. > >I think we need a lot more discussion of software architecture. I agree >Unix machines and their ilk are expensive and not very >popular (except with programmers). Not all Unix machines are expensive. The most popular, by far, Unix machines, those using the most popular Unix CPU, the 80286/386/486, are no more expensive than their PC brethren, because they are the same. >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. > The reason there is no good end-user software, except a few public domain things, is that until recently there was no industry-standard platform to run binaries on. Now that there is (386 PC clones), that might (or might not) change. There certainly exists a critical mass of machines out there. But there needs to be a critical mass of software, that can be bought at stores in malls. It will be interesting to see. To return to the subject of software architecture, I think a good topic of discussion might be windowing systems. However, there is already a group (comp.windows.misc) to which it might retire. Doug McDonald