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From: shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: AT&T 6300 at UVM
Message-ID: <3347@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 22-May-85 10:35:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.3347
Posted: Wed May 22 10:35:44 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 24-May-85 22:48:47 EDT
References: <109@nvuxf.UUCP>
Reply-To: shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley shebs)
Organization: Univ of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 46
Summary: 


In article <109@nvuxf.UUCP> markg@nvuxf.UUCP (M. Guzdial) writes:

>Mr. Shapiro mentions that he knows of some 10 members of his class of
>some 250 could bury a 6300, and that he would expect even greater
>numbers of demanding users at a larger university.  Surprisingly, I have
>not found this to be true.  Wayne State University has 35,000 students, and
>I found only a handful of undergrads who REQUIRED more CPU than even a
>Commodore-64.

This is one way to quantify the difference between "good" schools 
and "not-so-good" schools - multiply Mips, main memory size, and
disk size of the machine that undergrads are required to purchase,
then scale appropriately.  What's the Mips of a Commodore-64?

>Both of you mention your intense demands for "simulation, compiler 
>hacking" and artificial intelligence applications.  Great, but very
>few undergrads are going to have such demands...

At Utah, the CS undergrads really tax the 780, and there's not that
many of them.  ME students run structural analysis and solid modelling
programs, and EE students run VLSI design systems.  I don't know about
the other engineering students.

>I wrote a simple compiler for an even less-powerful
>CPU, a 6502-based "box," and I found that writing my own parser and code
>generator for that, and making it run well, easily kept me busy for a
>semester.

Writing programs in assembly language keeps me busy too, but it's not
particularly useful or educational.  Did you write the compiler on the
6502, or on a different machine?

>Why can't Lisp be run on such a machine?  Patrick
>Winston, co-author of "Lisp," seems to think that Golden Common Lisp on
>a PC is reasonable, according to his article in last month's Byte.
>Sure, if you're planning on doing massive Prolog-like
>resolutions you'll run the 6300 into the ground, but you'd do that to
>any processor short of a super-mini or a mainframe.

Lisp is an important part of the undergrad curriculum at Utah.
Fortunately, only the kiddies in CS105 do Lisp on a PC (Macintosh).
They only get 1200 items of heap space, which cramps the style of
even their programs.  After that, they know Lisp, and are ready to
write interesting programs that just won't fit on a PC.

							stan shebs