Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!im4u!ut-sally!husc6!think!ames!pasteur!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: <571@gethen.UUCP>
Date: 14 Jan 88 00:20:16 GMT
References: <7967@g.ms.uky.edu> <1363@sugar.UUCP> <8692@ccicpg.UUCP> <8021@g.ms.uky.edu> <8870@ccicpg.UUCP>
Reply-To: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Organization: There's Unix there in Oakland
Lines: 75

In article <8870@ccicpg.UUCP> harald@ccicpg.UUCP ( Harald Milne) writes:
>
>	Please everybody, this is not a discussion of OS religion, just
>some random thoughts about the future of the Amiga.

Fine, but you misstate several facts (not religious opinions), thus
muddling the issue.  To wit:

>> >The UNIX kernel on the machine I'm at right now (an AT&T 3b1) amounts
>> >to exactly 168,707 bytes.  This is bloated?
>> 
>
>	I was not refering to the size of the kernel, but the amount of disk
>space used. If you are talking about a reasonable implementation of UNIX, I
>would say 50meg barely scratches the surface. Look at the Mac II with AUX,
>80meg and 5 left for you. 

You seem to have conveniently left out the rest of my message, which I
will repeat:  the entire implementation of Unix on this machine, including
the kernel and all of the utilities and support files needed (lacking only
a few things like networking and on-line manuals, but including a crude
sort of windowing system) amounts to just a little over 10 megabytes.
In my book, this is NOT an excessive amount of space, especially considering
that that includes a full development environment, text formatting and
processing software, several editors, etc.

>	There is another problem with implementing UNIX, and that is disk
>performance. UNIX HAS to use a hard disk, and depends greatly on access
>times for performance, something that doesn't come cheap. (Well processor
>performance matters also!)

But with modern hard disks, this isn't such a horrible loss.  Again,
this system:  67 meg hard drive, 20 ms average access, and it works
quite acceptably fast, even when forced to swap processes continuously.
Retail price of hard disk: approximately $1000, NOT outrageously
expensive.

>	In 5 years, I still have not seen a cheap and reasonable performance 
>UNIX implemention for less than $5000. Im still waiting, I love UNIX, and
>would love to have it at home.

What do you consider 'reasonable performance'?  This system cost me about
$2500, and outperforms (by a considerable margin) the Vax 750 Unix I was
previously used to using.  Admittedly, that was at 'fire sale' prices,
but a brand-new 80386 system, running Microport or SCO flavors of System
V, should be able to come in at or near your $5000 target figure with
no particular problem.

>	And there is yet another problem, you HAVE to have a tape drive.
>How else can one reasonably manage megabytes of storage.

Not a problem unique to Unix, but one which is shared across ALL systems
which support large mass-storage devices.  The same problem will occur
with a vanilla Amiga running a large hard drive.

>	In summary, I don't feel UNIX is reasonable for the home computing
>market in general. It's just too expensive to implement. And its overkill
>for a machine that's supposed to be a personal computer, not an 80 user
>supermicro UNIX system.

I have to emphatically disagree.  This 3b1 is the most useful machine,
overall, that I have ever owned.  While Unix might not be the system of
choice for Joe Amigan, the average guy, it's a workable alternative for
those who could use its features and power.

>	And all this silly talk about disk space, I finally came to the
>conclusion that I need at least 50 megabytes to "use" the Amiga comfortably.

Well, I wouldn't mind, either :-)

-- 
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