Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!mcgill-vision!mouse
From: mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: AT&T Joining OSF
Message-ID: <1265@mcgill-vision.UUCP>
Date: 26 Aug 88 09:33:37 GMT
References: <347@spies.UUCP> <670025@hpclscu.HP.COM> <24355@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <381@infmx.UUCP>
Organization: McGill University, Montreal
Lines: 49

In article <381@infmx.UUCP>, aland@infmx.UUCP (Dr. Scump) writes:
> In article <1991@stpstn.UUCP>, aad@stpstn.UUCP (Anthony A. Datri) writes:
>> One of my gripes with [IBM] is that they refuse to abandon the
>> brain-damage of yesteryear.  EBCDIC.
> And *what* is the big problem with EBCDIC, except that "it's not
> ASCII"?

> Some people can't get used to having digits > letters and
> noncontiguous codes for letters; I can't get used to having uppercase
> letters be *less* than lowercase.

I want to step through the letters from A to Z (or a to z) a lot more
often than I want to compare an uppercase letter with a lowercase
letter.  Therefore, I'd rather have contiguous letters.  Particularly
since I don't lose the capability to compare two letters for case, just
that the test goes the other way.

> I also prefer EBCDIC hex dumps to ASCII octal dumps.

Dumping in either hex *or* octal is silly when you want to look at
memory locations as characters, a viewpoint which is implied by
discussing ASCII vs EBCDIC.  If I'm doing dumps of this sort, I prefer
a hex dump to an octal dump (unless it's for a PDP-8 :-).

> Does that make me brain-damaged? (let me rephrase that; do these
> factors *alone* make me brain-damaged?  :-] :-] :-] )

No, just somewhat twisted :-]

> The thing I *really* can't get used to: having every character I type
> (in raw mode applications, anyway) cause an interrupt, instead of
> being able to key in a screen worth before bothering the host
> system...

Why should this bother you?  How come you even notice this?  Seems to
me it doesn't matter who handles it; *someone* has to handle your
keystrokes, either the "host" cpu or a cpu sitting in the "terminal",
dedicated to doing nothing else.  If interrupts are cheap enough (and
UNIX box manufacturers generally take care that they are), it's not an
undue load on it....

I've got over half of a VAX 750 cpu now doing nothing but hanging on my
every keystroke, to mangle a metaphor.  A modern UNIX box is often
close to a single-user machine, which is what the processor in a 3270
really is - a (specialized) single-user machine.

					der Mouse

			old: mcgill-vision!mouse
			new: mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu