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From: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: Protected-mode snake oil
Message-ID: <1990Aug16.154637.20711@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 16 Aug 90 15:46:37 GMT
References: <5567@quanta.eng.ohio-state.edu>
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Reply-To: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lines: 29

In article <5567@quanta.eng.ohio-state.edu> PAT@rcgl1.eng.ohio-state.edu (Patrick Plaisted) writes:
>All that you say is true, but a comparison between the two operating
>systems is rather silly.  VMS consists of some 5.5 million lines of
>code; Mac OS of a couple thousand.

No, you're thinking of MS-DOS.  The Mac OS is a heck of a lot bigger than
2000 lines (if you include the Toolbox, which you pretty much have to; in fact,
since the mac doesn't have memory protection, pretty much every piece of
software on it is part of the "operating system", but I digress).

I'm sure you're right that VMS is much bigger than the Mac OS, though.

>Not that I'm flaming Mac's (I really like them!),

I'm not flaming VMS, either, though I would be MORE than happy to :-).

>but the operating
>system just isn't that robust.  Maybe when Mac's get real memory
>management in 7.0 things will be better.

The memory management in 7.0 isn't going to help AT ALL.  NONE.  NOT A BIT.
Any old application will still be able to step on anything tasty, anywhere.
(Of course, the more memory you have, the less likely your software is to
write on something dangerous when it starts dereferencing random pointers;
but this will probably at least balanced by the VM system itself, which
will have its own bugs.)
--
Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office
Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu  UUCP: {convex,uunet}!uiucuxc!dorner