Xref: utzoo alt.folklore.computers:7558 comp.unix.internals:1178 comp.misc:10681 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!usc!apple!agate!shelby!portia.stanford.edu!portia!pst From: pst@ir.Stanford.EDU (Paul Traina) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.unix.internals,comp.misc Subject: Re: Jargon file v2.1.5 28 NOV 1990 -- part 5 of 6 Message-ID: Date: 1 Dec 90 21:14:40 GMT References: <1YbxGQ#2fbT353y6xKD8DT83C4bFDpV=eric@snark.thyrsus.com> <1990Nov30.172512.5282@sctc.com> Sender: news@portia.Stanford.EDU Organization: Big Ed's Gas Farm, Twin Peaks, Washington Lines: 41 In-Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com's message of 1 Dec 90 16:05:38 GMT In article peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: Actually, those of us who still thing REAL UNIX means Version 6 or Version 7 find this particular comparison wonderfully appropriate. Version 7 UNIX at Berekeley supported 60 users on an 11/70. Not very well, but it stayed up and kept popping out prompts (albeit slowly). The EECSVAX running 4.0 BSD could handle maybe 35. The 386 box on my desk at work is a comparable machine, with 5 times the RAM of the old 11/70, but more than 10 users kill it dead. And that's probably more users than the typical 386-class UNIX box is expected to support. You're comparing CPU performance to I/O performance. It's natural that sofware will grow and become more complex. CPU's have done a good job of keeping up. However, most electrical engineers who design computers couldn't DESIGN a good CPU unit (read: chip/chip set) if their lives depended on it. However, they feel perfectly at home mucking up support hardware and I/O subsystems. Back when there were REAL(tm) computers like 780, a lot of time and energy went into designing efficient I/O from the CPU bus to the electrons going to the disk or tty. Now, Joe schlock, the snot nosed kid you used to beat up when you were a teenager, works for and thinks that he knows how to design a computer because he can cut and paste in pCAD. Sure OS's and apps have gotten bloated, but when you put a chip like the MIPS R3000 on a machine barely more advanced than an IBM-AT you end up with a toy that can think fast but can't do anything. I can't really blame companies like DEC and Sun for producing mismatched hardware, because their marketing drones are constantly trying to undercut each other in price. It's a hell of a lot more expensive to ship a product with a well designed I/O system than to drop in a "killer bitchen" CPU chip; occasionally someone makes the attempt do design a great piece of hardware, and you end up with something not half bad (like the DECstation 5000, which is only crippled by Ultrix (grin)). -- It's clear to me who the real enemy of the United States is--it's not Iraq. The enemy of the people of the United States is McDonald-Douglas, General Motors, General Electric, Lockheed, and the leaders of the combined forces of the United States. Do your patriotic duty--kill a hawk to save the country. Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com