Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!psuvax1!hsdndev!cmcl2!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: How wrong is MS-DOS? (or: What is the definition of obsolete)
Message-ID: <11143@lanl.gov>
Date: 11 Jan 91 23:58:10 GMT
References: <3120@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Organization: Los Alamos Natl Lab, Los Alamos, N.M.
Lines: 96

From article <3120@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>, by davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr):
> In article <11123@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>> [... grep is trivial ...]
>
>   So your job doesn't involve data analysis, or you have other tools.

Other tools.  As I said, the problem with grep is that what it does
is too trivial to deserve to be a separate tool.  I needs to be a
built-in capability of editors, database managers, etc..

> Anyone who has tried to learn how regular expressions really work knows
> it isn't trivial. If you use grep for matching "abc" that's fine, but it
> has a lot more power than that.

Regular expressions are usually covered in the first week of any good
compiler course.  Once you know the basics, a brute force grep should
only require a few hours to write from scratch.  The tool isn't useful
often enough to lavish lots of optimizations on it.  Save that kind
of effort for a regular expression search tool that's callable as a
library function - that's where you need it - built-in to other tools.

> [...]
> |       In view of this fact, 'grep' also falls into the next category.
> | 
> |    2) Useless.  These tools (and there are a lot of them) don't do
> |       anything I ever need to do.  
> 
>   That sounds like a bad argument to me. My spreadsheet was last
> accessed in October of 1988, does that make it useless? UNIX gives you
> lots of tools and you can use what's useful to you. [...]

Which, as I said, verges on the empty set.  If you don't need a
spreadsheet, you shouldn't have bought one.  The problem with UNIX
is that it comes with a whole host of software which is useless
to _me_, but I have to retain it because it's all needed for
system maintenance.

> [...]                                               DOS gives you next
> to nothing, and now that even BASIC is an extra cost item gives you no
> programmable capacity standard.

So, it breaks even with the _useful_ part of the UNIX distribution.
But, let's do a comparison.  MS-DOS (mail order discount) runs between
$70 and $140 (depending on which version you buy).  The cheapest UNIX
that I've seen (not MINIX, real UNIX) runs about $900.  I can buy a
considerable amount of MS-DOS software for that extra $760.  And, it
will all be stuff I actually _USE_ (or I wouldn't buy it).  Note:
I've heard that there's a new UNIX for PC's which just contains a
pcc-type compiler, a bourne shell clone, a half dozen utilities, and
UNIX itself of course - for $99.  For this kind of price, I may buy
a copy, just to play with.  At $900, you can forget it.

> [... spell vs. tools available on DOS ...]
> [...]                                                   and finally
> several commercial products which have the same functionality as the DOS
> products (different user interface, though).

Really?  I've been looking all over for such things.  The only ones I've
found are migrants _from_ MS-DOS.  Usually they run slower than their
PC counterparts.  The problem was, in order to port to UNIX they rewrote
in C.

> [...]
>   But UNIX runs on an XT. And like DOS it runs slowly, but many things
> run faster than DOS for the same effect.

Well, MINIX et. al. will run on XT's.  They aren't _really_ UNIX.
I looked into that stuff before.  At the time, my XT didn't have
sufficient space to install UNIX (DOS occupies almost no space).
Now, I have a much bigger system, but even so, UNIX would consume a
significant portion of my disk/memory.  By the way, I've never seen
_any_ PC-UNIX benchmarks which compared favorably to the same appli-
cation on DOS.

> [... integrated environments et. al. ...]
> 
>   I bet you will hear from Sabre and a few other people who sell things
> like this.

I hope so.  In any case, commercial UNIX software is usually more
costly (something about volume bringing the price down).  They'd
have to have a good price to lure me into a UNIX environment at
home (I'm already _stuck_ with UNIX at work).

> [...]
>     VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix.

Oh, I hope I lose then.  Better yet (since this is VMS you're talking
about), I think I'd rather not play at all.

By the way, don't get me wrong here.  I'm not an MS-DOS fanatic.  A number
of your complaints against DOS are quite valid.  A lot needs to be done
to make it more palatable.  But, UNIX would be, at best, a step sideways:
not forward.

J. Giles