Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!aplcen!haven!mimsy!mojo!stripes
From: stripes@eng.umd.edu (Joshua Osborne)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Speeding up Sun 4 X?
Summary: SPARC != 68000; C != Assembler; Mac != Sun
Keywords: Megabytes, memory hog
Message-ID: <1990Jan4.203816.1886@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 4 Jan 90 20:38:16 GMT
References: <33410@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <9001021710.AA11011@dart.cs.byu.edu> <50334@bbn.COM>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (The News System)
Organization: Merriversity of Uniland, College Purgatory
Lines: 40

In article <50334@bbn.COM> pplacewa@antares.bbn.com (Paul W Placeway) writes:
>mike@DART.CS.BYU.EDU (Mike Burbidge) writes:
>< At this point you
>< will have a server that uses under 2.5 meg of runtime memory.
>
>Ga!  (I usually won't use such an example, but in this case I have to
>make an exception:) At this point, the server is about 10 TIMES the
>size of the bitmap and windowing code in a Mac.  Now I could under-
>stand a doubling in size (after all, extra space is needed to run
>the server side of the network interface), but 10?!?!?
The Sun4 is SPARC baised, SPARC is a RISC.  Mac is 68000 baised, 68000 is a
CISC.  I do beleve CISC code is *more* compact then RISC code.  The Mac's
windowing system was written in assembler (designed to be called by Pascal), 
X is written in C.  Assembler is offen more compact then C, esp if your
assembler programer knows he has a 64K ROM and 128K RAM while the C programer
knows he has 4+Meg real mam, and tons of VM.  Who is to say that the Mac didn't
scrifice speed for space?  Mabie Sun choose speed over space?  And mabie X
provides more then the Mac's windowing system?  Which had *NO* color to begin
with (I don't know if you are talking about a Mac OS written for color or not).
[this isn't a flame of the Mac OS, I liked it alot last I used it]

>I personally don't see any reason why a workstation with 4 meg (real)
>shouldn't be able to support a kernal, a window system, and a useful
>application or three.  Really, more memoy is great, but it should be a
>*luxury* to make things run faster.
View OpenWindows as a luxury :-)    And MIT's X11 as window system for
your 4Meg box.

>Ga.  Will I need 128 Meg in my machine in 1999, just to edit files?
>Remember when Unix ran on a 64K machine?
Without memmory protection, no pageing (did it have swaping?), no network
(tcp/ip, NFS, RFS)...
-- 
           stripes@wam.umd.edu          "Security for Unix is like
      Josh_Osborne@Real_World,The          Mutitasking for MS-DOS"
      "The dyslexic porgramer"                  - Kevin Lockwood
Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because
God is not capricious or arbitrary.  No such faith comforts the software
engineer.
- Fred Brooks, Jr.