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From: raveling@vaxb.isi.edu (Paul Raveling)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: character-at-a-time I/O (was Re: Re^2: Unix bigotry)
Message-ID: <7593@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 21 Feb 89 19:57:42 GMT
References: <4434@freja.diku.dk> <5900004@hpfcdc.HP.COM> <3472@sugar.uu.net>
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Reply-To: raveling@isi.edu (Paul Raveling)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
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In article <3472@sugar.uu.net> karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) writes:
>
>If you want to go as fast as possible, you have to give up amenities.

	But if you want to approach, but perhaps not reach, going
	as fast as possible, it's sometimes possible to do this
	and to have better amenities.  Borrowing the fighter analogy,
	a good example was introduction of the Douglas DC-2/DC-3,
	which was faster than many of the "pursuit" aircraft of its
	day but carried passengers with more comfort than the
	transports of its day.

	Consider that aviation was about 30 years old when it gave
	rise to DC-2 technology; computing was about the same when
	UNIX arose.  Would we be happy flying DC-2's today, when
	modern airliners are 3 times faster and still more comfortable?
	[Well, at least they COULD put comfortable seats in them.]


	Or in the words of someone else here, "Why is this workstation
	running UNIX so much slower than my PC running DOS when I'm
	doing the same simple things?"  [BTW, the workstation DID have
	faster hardware than the PC.]

	Or in my words:  "Why can't I do on UNIX what we did on EPOS
	in 1975?  And why is UNIX so much slower for the things it CAN
	do?"
	
	BTW, for the most part EPOS' capabilities were a superset of
	UNIX's -- It ran at least one UNIX application with little or no
	change.  The one I'm aware of was icheck, which it adopted
	because a UNIX file system was one of the three types that
	EPOS supported simultaneously.

	This isn't a plug for EPOS -- it's a dead system, and it certainly
	wasn't perfect.  But we could take a lesson from aerospace and be
	more open to non-UNIX OS architectures for the sake of both
	capability and speed.


----------------
Paul Raveling
Raveling@isi.edu