Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!psuvax1!shire!schwartz From: schwartz@shire.cs.psu.edu (Scott E. Schwartz) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: IBM RISC Message-ID: Date: 26 Feb 90 07:19:03 GMT References: <9376@portia.Stanford.EDU> <00405@sarek.UUCP> Sender: news@cs.psu.edu (Usenet) Organization: Penn State University Computer Science Lines: 16 In article <00405@sarek.UUCP> gsarff@sarek.UUCP (Gary Sarff) writes: >There seem to be two different camps here. I have seen numerous postings in >this group saying "architecture/machine xxx (sparc,mips,...) will do better, >look at all the applications/software base we have for the xxx architecture." >The poster above, says porting is nothing more than recompiling. We can't >have it both ways. Don't take my word for it, look at recent history. Three years ago a Sun4 was just a wet dream. Now SPARC is Sun's flagship architecture. If porting software was that serious a problem we'd know it. Ditto for MIPS, ibm RT, Moto 88K, etc, of course. Granted, the key to all this is coding applications in a high level language and for a portable OS. -- Scott Schwartz schwartz@cs.psu.edu "the same idea is applied today in the use of slide rules." -- Don Knuth