Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!pacbell.com!decwrl!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!athene!pcg From: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: The CPU with 3 brains---486 compatibility with 8008 Message-ID: Date: 10 Nov 90 14:54:52 GMT References: <42737@mips.mips.COM> <1990Nov4.014901.23819@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Nov6.223738.13265@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <9333@b11.ingr.com> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 37 Nntp-Posting-Host: odin In-reply-to: lhughes@b11.ingr.com's message of 7 Nov 90 14:01:37 GMT On 7 Nov 90 14:01:37 GMT, lhughes@b11.ingr.com (Lawrence Hughes) said: lhughes> Welcome to the wonderful world of multi-megabyte executables lhughes> that barely fit in 2 MB systems, barely crawl on 25 MHz CPUs lhughes> and won't even run on any known diskette system. Compliments of lhughes> brothers Kernigan and Ritchie. Poor Kernighan and Ritchie must be turning in their graves -- oops sorry, they are fortunately still with us :-). V7 Unix was designed to run efficiently on a 64KB adress space machine. C used to generate programs withing 10% of the space and speed of comaprable assembler. I used to run a PDP-11/34 with 2.9BSD and five users doing development in 248KB, of which about 96KB were taken by the kernel (including the buffer cache etc...). The problem we have now is that we are running the same thing twenty years later when a laptop has got vastly more power and a more sophisticated architecture than a PDP-11/34, and that the people doing development are simply not of the caliber, or at least of the good taste, of Kernighan and Ritchie, in language, compiler, and OS architecture. lhughes> Larry (in shaky voice: "When I was a lad - we barely had 64K bytes of lhughes> memory, and were GRATEFUL for it".... cough cough) Hughes I also dote (as above) on when we had to make do with little. Naturally one is happy that now we have by comparison plenty -- the disappointment is on how badly this plenty is being exploited -- it is being used not to build more useful sw, but more poorly written one. Unfortunately it is more difficult to find a programmer than a megabyte -- or, let me repeat myself, we have more good Japanese process engineers than good Western programmers. -- Piercarlo Grandi | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk