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From: pf@diab.UUCP (Per Fogelstrom)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.unix.wizards,comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Free Software Foundation (was: Re: Mach, the new standard?)
Message-ID: <303@ma.diab.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 7-Sep-87 03:08:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: ma.303
Posted: Mon Sep  7 03:08:08 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 10-Sep-87 06:48:46 EDT
References: <8520@utzoo.UUCP> <1883@encore.UUCP> <677@stracs.cs.strath.ac.uk>
Reply-To: pf@ma.UUCP (Per Fogelstrom)
Organization: Diab Data AB, Taby, Sweden
Lines: 29
Xref: mnetor comp.arch:2121 comp.unix.wizards:4158 comp.os.misc:154

In article <677@stracs.cs.strath.ac.uk> jim@cs.strath.ac.uk writes:
>I agree with the gist of what you say, essentially that programmers
>need not have to worry too much about the underlying hardware. However,
>we should not forget that sometimes these "artificial" hardware
>constraints can be a benefit. Remember that the UNIX kernel in the days
>of V7 (and before) fitted into 64K because that was as big a program
>that a PDP could run (notwithstanding sep I/D or fancy overlays or
>extended addressing). To quote Ritchie and Thompson's original CACM paper:
>"the size constraint has encouraged not only economy, but also a certain
>elegance of design". Where would UNIX be today without that minimalism?

Unix today is not what it was many years ago. Nowdays it has viritual memory
, networking and much much more built in.
 
>Now we have editors that easily guzzle a megabyte (or more) of memory
>and take forever to start up. So much for progress. A program's quality
>or usefulness is not necessarily related to its size.

I belive You refere to "emacs" type editors. The main reason for the slow 
stratup is not the size of the program, rather than it is reading a huge
ammount of files, containing macros, key bindings, etc. A small program
would not do that faster i belive. And using up a megabyte ? Not if You
only use the simplest functions. The reason for being big is the ammount
of more or less usefull functions and commands built in.

By the way. One of the more important fetures with Unix is the ability to
link programs together with pipes. In that way, functions could be put
in to "small" programs like sed, cat, sort, etc and called up together
in a shell script to form some complex functions.