Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!apple!usc!wuarchive!uunet!comp.vuw.ac.nz!am.dsir.govt.nz!dsiramd!marcamd!tcnz2!greg From: greg@tcnz2.tcnz.co.nz (Greg Calkin) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: The CPU with 3 brains---486 compatibility with 8008 Message-ID: <469@tcnz2.tcnz.co.nz> Date: 12 Nov 90 05:12:03 GMT References: <42737@mips.mips.COM> <1990Nov4.014901.23819@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Nov6.223738.13265@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <9333@b11.ingr.com> Reply-To: greg@tcnz.co.nz (Greg Calkin) Organization: Thomas Cook NZ Head Office, Auckland, NZ Lines: 28 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. Is this a cheap shot at C or Unix ? Kernigan and Ritchie were both involved in plan-9, which is a stunning simple, very small operating system. They can hardly be blamed for the bloat in Unix. Some has come from marketing, some from features added, including bits for BSD, etc. So many people have had their hands in the pie that it long since passed from K&R's sphere of control. They have criticised the bloat too. In article pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes: pcg>Poor Kernighan and Ritchie must be turning in their graves -- oops pcg>sorry, they are fortunately still with us :-). V7 Unix was designed to pcg>run efficiently on a 64KB adress space machine. C used to generate pcg>programs withing 10% of the space and speed of comaprable assembler. I pcg>used to run a PDP-11/34 with 2.9BSD and five users doing development in pcg>248KB, of which about 96KB were taken by the kernel (including the pcg>buffer cache etc...). Are there any K&R C compilers left ? -- Greg Calkin, Systems Engineer and Dreamer (greg@tcnz.co.nz) Thomas Cook N.Z. Limited, PO Box 24, Auckland CPO, New Zealand, Ph (09)-793920 Disclaimer : Would you buy a used car from someone with these opinions ?