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From: melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger)
Subject: Re: Simple UNIX editor
In-Reply-To: nigelm@ohm.york.ac.uk's message of 29 May 91 16: 48:28 GMT
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References: <1991May28.091304.3332@fennel.cc.uwa.oz.au>
	<May.28.10.41.19.1991.17169@yoko.rutgers.edu>
	<1991May28.202926.12698@uwasa.fi>
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	<1991May29.164828.6077@ohm.york.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 30 May 1991 22:18:44 GMT
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In article <1991May29.164828.6077@ohm.york.ac.uk> nigelm@ohm.york.ac.uk (Nigel Metheringham) writes:

   I end up with the problem, however, that gnu emacs is a >1MB image,
   and does not do a great deal for the system's performance (well
   actually it does - a dozen invocations of emacs slogs the
   performance drastically).  Thats why we only make Micro-EMACS
   available for student use.

I wonder when computer time will become less important than the user's
time?  What kind of equipment are you using over across the pond?  The
main binary of Emacs is shared among all the users so you are going to
have 12MB images for 12 users.  How much does RAM cost in the UK?  We
just bought 16MB of RAM for our NeXT Cube for $640.  Hell, a 68040
NeXTstation costs $3250 and a SPARC SLC costs $2700 at educational
prices.  That's enough mips to make me add 'alias vi emacs -nw -q' to
my .cshrc.

   Emacs is fine as long as you a prepared to pay the price for having
   a complete operating system written in lisp within your editor!

Memmory and mips are cheap.  What's the big deal?

-Mike