Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Next computer (Re: CISC Silent Spring)
Message-ID: <2093@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 7 Feb 90 13:37:52 GMT
References: <8859@portia.Stanford.EDU> <20571@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <49956@sgi.sgi.com> <4791@helios.ee.lbl.gov>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 44

In article <4791@helios.ee.lbl.gov> antony@lbl-csam.arpa (Antony A. Courtney) writes:

| May be fascist, but it works.  Just look at what a mess things were in for a
| while when PCs didn't come standard with a mouse.  Designers couldn't ASSUME
| the user had a mouse, and that made the overhead of application writing very
| extreme.  

  Whatever gave you the idea that PC come standard with a mouse? We have
about 1200 and I would guess <300 have a mouse. It's an extra cost
option on most systems.

|           And look at workstations:  Every Sun has a 19" screen.  Imagine if
| there were other screens available?  Do you think everyone would have bought
| a 19" screen?  No way.  And what would that have done to the development of
| window systems?  I suspect it would have hampered it severely...

  This will be a shock, but all Suns do not come standard with a 19 inch
screen, or we have been getting optional small monitors ;-) Almost all
of our Sun/4 and Sparcstations have the 15 inch color screen.

|                                                            This same principle
| is also what made UNIX so spiffy.  Researchers wrote Multics.  It sucked.  But
| people learned an awful lot about what should and shouldn't be in an OS and
| how to implement OSs.  Then people scrapped it and wrote UNIX based on things
| which had been learned from previous OSs.  

  I suspect that you have never used Multics and don't recall that UNIX
was written because there was not enough access to Multics. UNIX is just
beginning to implement some of the ideas which have been working in
Multics for two decades, such as mapping files to memory.

  The only reason Multics is not where UNIX is today is that it was
developed by one company which didn't know how to sell computers and
then rights went to another. If Multics had been ported to minis and
micros as soon as the hardware would support it, a lot of people running
it on large machines would use it on everything.

  There was some negotiation to buy the Multics rights from Honeywell
and port it to the 386 (you really need those four levels of privilege),
but I was told that Honeywell was afraid that it would cut into the GCOS
market. That's too bad.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
            "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me