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From: crowl@cs.rochester.edu (Lawrence Crowl)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: brash micros versus the Big Iron: not yet
Message-ID: <1866@sol.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 4-Sep-87 10:53:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: sol.1866
Posted: Fri Sep  4 10:53:21 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 17:37:09 EDT
References: <622@winchester.UUCP> <12953@amdahl.amdahl.com> <630@winchester.UUCP> <8524@utzoo.UUCP> <1297@geac.UUCP>
Reply-To: crowl@cs.rochester.edu (Lawrence Crowl)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 16

In article <1297@geac.UUCP> john@geac.UUCP (John Henshaw) writes:
>..., software is more "malleable" than hardware and therefore in many ways,
>far easier to work with than hardware. This of course means that it provides
>plenty of opportunity to make mistakes, but I believe that the cost of
>repairing those software mistakes is *usually* lower than that of hardware.

Yes.  A thousand chip board is far less mallable than a thousand line program.
However, most systems tend to have hardware on the order of a thousand chips
and software on the order of a million lines of code.  A thousand chip board is
probably easier to get right (by whatever measure) than a million line program.
However, field upgrades are much cheaper for software than hardware.

-- 
  Lawrence Crowl		716-275-8479	University of Rochester
		     crowl@cs.rochester.arpa	Computer Science Department
 ...!{allegra,decvax,seismo}!rochester!crowl	Rochester, New York,  14627