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From: peter@sugar.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: True Multitasking, and some history lessons
Message-ID: <163@sugar.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 12-Jun-87 07:33:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: sugar.163
Posted: Fri Jun 12 07:33:40 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 17-Jun-87 00:48:10 EDT
References: <8706040024.AA10895@cogsci.berkeley.edu> <2194@husc6.UUCP> <286@l5comp.UUCP>
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 19
Summary: UNIX systems don't all have tons of RAM

> Third, the reason the Amiga tends to have better memory usage is really quite
> simple. Un*x systems tend to have TONS of memory lying around. This affects
> how you code. If ram is available and using it will simplify something then
> why not use it rather than spend days coding around the lack of ram?

Some of us remember the days when UNIX systems didn't have tons of RAM. At
one place we had 8 users running on a PDP 11/40 with 256 K words of RAM. On
the PDP-11 you had 128K MAX per process. When faced with these constraints
and the lack of incentive to do much graphics (because you didn't have any)
UNIX programs tended to be small and tight. It used to be that you could code
the world in 64K.

Amiga programs should also be small and tight if they just use CLI. After
all, the AmigaDOS functions are pretty close to isomorphic to the UNIX ones.
Why they aren't is a matter to take up with the likes of Lattice and Manx.
I still haven't figured out why they tend to put two or three extra layers in
between you and the DOS. open() should be nothing but a little argument
massage and a call to Open()... file descriptors should be isomorphic to
file handles.