Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!b-tech!umich!pha From: pha@zippy.eecs.umich.edu (Paul Anderson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: Re: some questions for the gurus. Message-ID: <1132@zippy.eecs.umich.edu> Date: 7 Sep 88 01:06:19 GMT References: <8809051853.AA03917@mailgw.cc.umich.edu> Sender: news@zippy.eecs.umich.edu Reply-To: pha@zippy.eecs.umich.edu (Paul Anderson) Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept. Ann Arbor Lines: 36 UUCP-Path: ihnp4!umich!zippy!pha In article <8809051853.AA03917@mailgw.cc.umich.edu> rees@caen.engin.umich.edu (Jim Rees) writes: > >A timesharing system is different. If you screw that up, you screw >everyone. But workstations are supposed to put the power into individual >people's hands. I think that's an important distinction. When you start Jim, this is true, but some machine resources are still expensive enough that they must, by virtue of their cost, be shared among hundreds of users. This means that, workstation or not, they must have the security, and more importantly, the robustness of a mainframe. A major flaw in Apollo's past thinking is that their machines should be used *only* as workstations, therefore, in a number of cases, justifying flawed implementations of things that could have and should have worked as well as a mainframe. I hope that this attitude is changing, because I have yet to see a workstation better than an Apollo overall, yet it is clear that some additional effort will allow networks of Apollos to finally, and truly compete head to head with more traditional mainframe sites, and blow them out of the water in every respect, bar none. >treating your workstations as timesharing systems, you've taken power out of >the hands of the people, and put it into the hands of the bureaucrats. I >think that's bad. All of you users out there should be worried when people I think it's bad, too, but neither extreme is really acceptable, especially if either viewpoint is used to justify sloppy implementation. >who run computer labs start asking how they can prevent users from shutting >down the system. Let them know that's the wrong question to ask. >------- Paul Anderson CAEN