Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ucla-cs!zen!ucbvax!unisoft!gethen!farren
From: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: The REAL problem is the nature of personal computers.
Message-ID: <557@gethen.UUCP>
Date: 10 Jan 88 08:40:51 GMT
References: <7967@g.ms.uky.edu> <1363@sugar.UUCP> <8692@ccicpg.UUCP>
Reply-To: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Organization: There's Unix there in Oakland
Lines: 34

In article <8692@ccicpg.UUCP> harald@ccicpg.UUCP ( Harald Milne) writes:
>
>	Well there is more to it than an inconvenience. You need an MMU, 
>which means you need a 68020 (unless it's a custom MMU). Then you need a
>bloated OS like UNIX to support users that are not on your machine to
>compete with your "resources".

The UNIX kernel on the machine I'm at right now (an AT&T 3b1) amounts
to exactly 168,707 bytes.  This is bloated?  Even including all of the
utilities only brings the total up to 3.5 megabytes, and that is one
HELL of a lot of utilities.  Unix need not be, and, in fact, is not,
noticably bigger than any other OS of similar capabilities.

>To have UNIX (or for that matter ANY multiuser
>OS) you need a hard disk to deal with these LARGE issues. Add to that,
>the overhead and "non realtime" response of such an OS.

The same thing is true, to some extent, for ANY OS of any sophistication.
It's not limited to Unix.  As it is, with AmigaDOS, to do any amount of
real development work, I have to shuffle three floppies in and out of
two disk drives.  Are you going to claim that this is convenient?
Multiuser is NOT a consideration.  You can run Unix in single-user
mode; such systems commonly boot off of one floppy (although you can't
do much useful work with one floppy).  Even in multiuser mode, only
the resources actually in use are loaded - the only impact multiuser
has on a system with no users other than root is in the gettys running
on all the ports - programs which, typically, are idle anyway, and thus
not consuming CPU.

-- 
Michael J. Farren             | "INVESTIGATE your point of view, don't just 
{ucbvax, uunet, hoptoad}!     | dogmatize it!  Reflect on it and re-evaluate
        unisoft!gethen!farren | it.  You may want to change your mind someday."
gethen!farren@lll-winken.llnl.gov ----- Tom Reingold, from alt.flame