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From: guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.micro.68k
Subject: Re: 68vs86 (flame?)
Message-ID: <2328@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 20-Jun-85 05:41:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.2328
Posted: Thu Jun 20 05:41:23 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 22-Jun-85 23:48:53 EDT
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Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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> The two microprocessor families were targeted at different markets. The
> 8086 family at the business market (bean counters) and the 68000 at the
> scientific market (electron pushers).
> 
> Further, the 8086 family was designed with multiple users in mind, so
> that a whole corral of bean counters could (eventually) use the same
> machine or one bean counter could count several different colors of
> bean at one time.
> 
> The 68000 was designed with crunching numbers and pushing electrons
> around at the maximum speed. For ONE electron pusher.

Can anybody from Intel and Motorola back these claims up, or are they just
speculation?  I suspect both chip families were designed for anybody who'd
buy 'em.  The 80*2*86 may have an MMU on-chip, but the 8086 doesn't, so it's
no more "designed with multiple users in mind" than the 68000 was.
Furthermore, Motorola has come out with two MMU designs for the 68000 family
- why would they have done so if they intended it for single-tasking systems
only?

> Also, as I was hacking back in the Dark Ages of Microcomputers (the
> early 70's) multi user/tasking systems seem to be a giant step
> backwards to the old mainframe mentality. I can see interleaving a CPU
> intensive task (like a compiler or assembler) with an I/O bound task
> (like an editor) and a couple of interrupt sources to run a knee-jerk
> print spooler, but going beyond a simple foreground/background system
> seems to be overkill - and degrading (of the system, that is.)

Please don't combine the two phrases "multi-tasking" and "multi-user"
into one.  They are two separate things.  My workstation can run multi-user
(if somebody wants to "rlogin" to it), but isn't intended to be used that
way.  It does support many tasks, though, and I'm damn glad for that.  I'm a
multitasking system - my computer should be also.  (I have one window
monitoring mail, one displaying the current time, one displaying a graph of
CPU utilization, one remotely logged in to "sun", one waiting to remotely
log into another machine, and another one giving a shell on my own machine.)

As for "degrading the system", our MMU adds no wait states.  Yes, the OS
imposes more overhead because it's a multi-tasking OS - but I sincerely
doubt that running a single-tasking OS would make this machine enough faster
that it'd be worth sacrificing the convenience of having multiple active
windows.  (You might be able to cut down on some of the overhead by running
an OS that supports multiple tasks but provides minimal protection; it might
run all processes in one common address space.  Of course, FNE wouldn't like
an example that comes to mind because it's written in Mesa, not assembly
language...)

	Guy Harris