Jargon file v2.1.5 28 NOV 1990 -- part 5 of 6

[Paul Traina]

In article <O7Y77DB at xds13.ferranti.com> peter at ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

   Actually, those of us who still thing REAL UNIX means Version 6 or Version 7
   find this particular comparison wonderfully appropriate. Version 7 UNIX at
   Berekeley supported 60 users on an 11/70. Not very well, but it stayed up
   and kept popping out prompts (albeit slowly). The EECSVAX running 4.0 BSD
   could handle maybe 35. The 386 box on my desk at work is a comparable
   machine, with 5 times the RAM of the old 11/70, but more than 10 users kill
   it dead. And that's probably more users than the typical 386-class UNIX box
   is expected to support.

You're comparing CPU performance to I/O performance.  It's natural
that sofware will grow and become more complex.  CPU's have done a
good job of keeping up.  However, most electrical engineers who design
computers couldn't DESIGN a good CPU unit (read: chip/chip set) if
their lives depended on it.  However, they feel perfectly at home
mucking up support hardware and I/O subsystems.

Back when there were REAL(tm) computers like 780, a lot of time and
energy went into designing efficient I/O from the CPU bus to the
electrons going to the disk or tty.  Now, Joe schlock, the snot nosed
kid you used to beat up when you were a teenager, works for <generic
PC clone ripoff company> and thinks that he knows how to design a
computer because he can cut and paste in pCAD.

Sure OS's and apps have gotten bloated, but when you put a chip like
the MIPS R3000 on a machine barely more advanced than an IBM-AT you
end up with a toy that can think fast but can't do anything.  I can't
really blame companies like DEC and Sun for producing mismatched
hardware, because their marketing drones are constantly trying to
undercut each other in price.  It's a hell of a lot more expensive to
ship a product with a well designed I/O system than to drop in a
"killer bitchen" CPU chip; occasionally someone makes the attempt do
design a great piece of hardware, and you end up with something not
half bad (like the DECstation 5000, which is only crippled by Ultrix
(grin)).
--
It's clear to me who the real enemy of the United States is--it's not Iraq.
The enemy of the people of the United States is McDonald-Douglas, General
Motors, General Electric, Lockheed, and the leaders of the combined forces of
the United States.  Do your patriotic duty--kill a hawk to save the country.