Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!mandrill!hal!ncoast!allbery
From: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Jerry Pournelle on UNIX (From BYTE)
Message-ID: <6952@ncoast.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jan 88 23:27:58 GMT
References: <1495@osiris.UUCP>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery)
Followup-To: comp.unix.wizards
Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh
Lines: 40

As quoted from <1495@osiris.UUCP> by mjr@osiris.UUCP (Marcus J. Ranum):
+---------------
| From Jan BYTE: (Jerry Pournelle)
| 
| 	"I must say that as I watch the OS/2 story unfold, I do begin to
| wonder: if UNIX is ever made stable enough to be put in ROM, so that you
| don't need a guru to maintain the system, there's less and less reason why
| it won't catch on. I think of little that OS/2 promises that you can't do
| with UNIX; and now that American Management Systems has developed the
| long-mythical user-friendly UNIX shell, who knows ?
+---------------

He also comments on "too big and too slow".  Too big?  Maybe -- if you want
System V or 4BSD.  Anyone for Minix?  As for "too slow":  I've seen slow UNIX
systems.  Then again, I'll bet he tested it on either an ACS986 or a VAX; the
former would be slow running almost anything (8086's be not fast) and the
latter's architecture just isn't suited to UNIX.  While I've seen slow UNIX
systems, I've also seen some pretty fast ones -- such as the 3b1 I'm using
as a terminal to the Plexus P/35 which does a d*mned good job for the load
on it.  And a P/60 measured with the SysV load average daemon runs as fast
with a load average of 5.5 as it does with a load of 0.5.  (I never saw it go
any higher, even with 20-25 active users in a database which is as computation-
intensive as it is disk-intensive.  [I should know:  I wrote the computation
parts.])

UNIX in ROM?  Where was JEP when BYTE ran its review of the HP150?  (That
machine was a bit ahead of its time.  But imagine one crossed with a Sun
3/50....)

OS/2?  See my .signature.

As far as another poster's comment about Jerry doing an about-face wrt. UNIX
vs. SideKick et al, consider that before the 386 UNIX was pretty much wasted
on those little boxes.  Certainly, my MS-DOS-based ITT XTRA (8088) was much
faster than the Xenix ACS586/986 (8086), and also faster than 80286 Xenix
boxes.  Those two processors just couldn't handle multitasking.
-- 
	      Brandon S. Allbery, Moderator of comp.sources.misc
 {hoptoad,harvard!necntc,cbosgd,sun!mandrill!hal,uunet!hnsurg3}!ncoast!allbery
PS/2:  Half a computer.    OS/2:  Half an operating system for half a computer.