Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!bu-cs!bzs
From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?
Message-ID: <31762@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 25 May 89 04:02:19 GMT
References: <106326@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <10317@smoke.BRL.MIL> <106584@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Followup-To: comp.unix.wizards
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 48


The problem with asking this question is that it first presumes what
the GNU/OS will be used for.

The note I just read (a few notes back) seemed to presume that GNU/OS
had better provide a lot of features desireable in a time-sharing
environment with lots of potentially stupid/hostile/careless users.

My guess is that it will be most attractive to the person with a
primarily single-user machine (workstation, high-end PC etc.) I would
tend to weight priorities toward that kind of user.

Something I think important is that the kernel be designed well for a
lot of parallelism.

CPU's are cheap commodities (bus bandwidth ain't tho.) I wouldn't be
surprised if personal class machines with 8 or 16 20+MIPS CPUs start
showing up in the next very few years. Most of the Unix's around today
can't accommodate that very well, mostly because the good ideas are
still waiting to be thought.

I'll also predict that 64Mb memory chips are not as far away as
readers might think which means PC's with main memories larger than
what we now consider generous *disk* configurations (eg. the 4MB
system of today becomes the 256MB system of tomorrow) should be
commonplace.

Another thing that should be coming is lots of real-time networking
with lots of data coming and going (eg. ISDN with all sorts of
wire-services and your computer sitting at home sifting through all
day for interesting things to show you when you come home.)

And multi-media environments (video, voice, hypertext, on-line
libraries, data gloves, MIDI, 3d heads-up displays, computerized
clothing with tactile feedback, cyberspace...) We're going to need a
lot of control over the time domain to make all that work, that's an
OS issue.

With hardware like that lots of things will have to be re-thought.

It's not just more of the same thing, at some point quantitative
changes force qualitative re-evaluation, new things become possible,
new needs arise, the formerly unimportant suddenly becomes critical.
-- 
	-Barry Shein

Software Tool & Die, Purveyors to the Trade
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