Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!pepper!cmcmanis From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: The REAL problem is the nature of personal computers. Message-ID: <38467@sun.uucp> Date: 11 Jan 88 19:06:44 GMT References: <7967@g.ms.uky.edu> <1363@sugar.UUCP> <8692@ccicpg.UUCP> <8021@g.ms.uky.edu> <8870@ccicpg.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.uucp Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 56 Harald made some valid points about UNIX (tm) and its siblings. Basically while the kernel may be kept under 500K the utilities, tools and other stuff that everyone 'expects' UNIX to have usually add up to a lot of disk space. Added to that, UNIX processes can be fairly large and that requires virtual memory of some sort, etc, etc, etc. But then he goes on and says ... In article <8870@ccicpg.UUCP> harald@ccicpg.UUCP ( Harald Milne) writes: > 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. Five years ago (1983) the cry was for a UNIX system that cost less than $10,000, and that has been reached by a number of people. (Maybe even Apple :-)) It was only recently that the call went out for the $5K UNIX box, so maybe in another 5 years? Of course computers are on this strange exponential development path, maybe it will only take 2.5 years. > 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. Well, all I can say is don't limit yourself arbitrarily. It's coming no matter what you or I say about it. :-) >> I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that a VM Unix could be written >> whose executable size is less than the Amiga's existing ROM Kernel (192K). The above was not Harald's comment, it was obviously someone who has never looked at the inside of a UNIX VM kernel. It all depends on what you leave in the kernel and what you leave out. Window system? Network software? etc. You could do it if a) you wrote in assembler, and b) you only worried about simple tty output. (No System V tty driver for these folks). Basically, Apple is spending millions of dollars to do this, so we will get to see how well they fair when they get done. I would like to see a version of AmigaDOS which was written to work on the '020 and didn't bother with coddling up to miscreant developers. Things like MEMF_PUBLIC would be enforced, messages would be passed in shared memory segments etc etc. Then I would rewrite DOS, keeping all the calls but making a faster file system and then write a CLI that was a combination of TOPS-20 and a Sun cmdtool. But hey, if wishes were horses, dreamers would ride. Now where did I put my saddle :-) [Oh and for all of you wonderful people who sent mail Re: where UNIX figures out if something should be run by shell, thank you. One of the interesting things about working for Sun is that if you say something stupid about UNIX everyone wants to point it out to you ! :-) ] ---- UNIX and probably System V are trademarks of AT&T. ---- --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.