Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!crdgw1!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!emory!gatech!mcnc!ecsgate!ecsvax!seals
From: seals@uncecs.edu (Larry W. Seals)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: A tirade about inefficient software & systems
Summary: Where did it start?
Message-ID: <1990Oct25.165215.9453@uncecs.edu>
Date: 25 Oct 90 16:52:15 GMT
References: <9886@milton.u.washington.edu> <38697@ut-emx.uucp>
Organization: UNC Educational Computing Service
Lines: 35



It occurs to me that you have to look past the recent PC history to
what came before.  I've worked on mainframe and mini systems with 
bulky operating systems where the upgrades (some free, some expensive)
are nothing more than fixes of the SPARs that came before.  On the 
system I'm currently working with, we're on version 22.1.1.R3 of the 
Op/Sys which we recently upgraded to from vs. 22.1.1.R1.  We skipped
R2 because it was so buggy (R3 fixed the regression errors from R2).
At least our upgrades were free.  Same thing with our word processing
software and our DBMS package.

I agree also that building software so fat and kludgy and hoping that
faster CPUs, disks and memory will make them efficient is plain 
stupid!  My previous boss was of that school.  Our company was writing
test administration software to be administered to physicians either
at home or at our site.  He insisted that it be written in COBOL (gag!)
and all developement and testing took place on P/S 2 Model 50s. When
the software was demonstrated, of course it ran like the wind. What we
couldn't make him understand is that not everyone has power like that
at their disposal. Two years later the project is still underway (I
left over a year ago because of disputes over just this issue - I 
advocated writing the software in C with some sort of optimization for
the lowest common denominator in terms of hardware) with probably
thousands of lines of COBOL code written. I can't wait to see how it
runs on a plain vanilla PC or XT (I know how it runs on a 286 P/S 2
Model 30... can you say DOG? [I knew you could ;-) ]).

What a waste!

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