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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.arch,net.followup,net.micro
Subject: Re: ATT and the 3B
Message-ID: <1944@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 24-May-84 01:28:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.1944
Posted: Thu May 24 01:28:33 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 26-May-84 13:25:41 EDT
References: <2043@tekig.UUCP> <310@utastro.UUCP>
Organization: CCI Office Systems Group, Reston, VA
Lines: 58

> I played with an ATT 3B2 a couple of days ago, running system V Unix,
> so I guess the secret is out.

It's definitely been announced publicly (full-page ads and everything),
so it certainly is out.

> The only benchmark I had time to run was the "sieve" from Byte Magazine,
> which ran 100 iterations in 36 seconds, or 3.6 seconds for 10.  Our Vax
> 11/780 runs the same benchmark in 1.3 seconds if the variables are
> declared "register" and in 2.5 seconds if they are declared "int", for
> 10 iterations.  This places the 3b2 [for integer operations only!] at
> about 0.5 Vaces.  I didn't have access to the source code for the bench-
> mark so I don't know how the variables were declared.

I suspect the benchmark was written to make full use of the 3B's capabilities,
and it has a number of registers (not quite as many as the VAX-11 - somewhere
around 11 32-bit general purpose registers, if I remember correctly), so
I suspect they were declared "register" - so it's about 1/3 11/780 under
those circumstances.  I'd be curious to see the Bell B1-B7 benchmarks on
that machine.

> While I was very impressed with the hardware, I was very unimpressed with
> the software.  They *did* have "vi" but termcaps were not yet set, they
> didn't have "more" or "pg" and the "ls" command ran things off the screen
> (fast) in a single column display (!).

Hmmm... I'd heard System V Release 2 had "pg" and a Berkeley-style "ls".
Either I heard wrong or they didn't have 5R2 on that 3B.

> Apparently someone at AT&T decided to chop Unix up into clumps of a few
> programs each, and sell them separately.  You can get the "C" compiler in
> one package -- but the assembler and loader are in a different one!  [If you
> use "C" you don't *need* assembler, right, guys?]

*Choke*  Geepers, don't "pcc" (which is the basis of almost all the UNIX
C compilers out there) and most other UNIX C compilers produce assembly
code which is then run through the assembler?  Sounds like you can't even
produce object code, much less executable programs, with that package!
*D*U*M*B*, guys...

> Nroff was conspicuous by its absence, as was troff and any other
> word-processing software.

> This may all be growing pains at AT&T, who never had to sell anything ever,
> and they just don't know how people use their computers.  I hope their
> learning curve is very steep.

Fortune packaged/packages their UNIX systems similarly; I suspect it may be
aimed at the end user who buys a box and a bunch of applications software
(including, possibly, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get word processor which
will probably not only be considerably more user-friendly than "vi" and
"nroff", but a lot faster than those two beasts to boot!) and won't need
all that stuff.  On the other hand, if they don't have any fully-packaged
systems to sell to people who want a computer, not a turnkey box, they'll
probably get beaten up.

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy