Eighth Edition and job control (was Re: UNIX Futures)

[Tim Smith]

In article <59 at brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.ARPA writes:
>>
>>There is no reason one can not turn any of these into a reasonable
>>5620 emulator.  The large screen of the 5620 is nice, but I think one
>>could live with the smaller screens of the above computers.
>
>The 5620 does far more than provide windows.  There is a large amount
>of work involved in developing the cross-SGS, libraries, etc.
>Indeed, I've had to do considerable work just to port the existing
>code to a new host.  (To be fair, I should admit that much of this
>work should not have been necessary if portable coding practices
>had been used and if the target host had had a better C compiler.)
>

Amen on portable coding practices!  Yes, lot's of 5620 stuff would
not be easy to deal with ( proof and jim come to mind ... ), but
I think one could get a lot of the 5620s advantages at a reasonable
cost.  I define reasonable cost as that which I can convince the
company to spend. :-(

>>Anyone care to predict how long the dumb terminal will last?  Unless
>>it is real cheap ( i.e., almost free ), I can't see any reason to get
>>one when for maybe twice as much I can get a computer and run a terminal
>>emulator.
>
>My Branch has quit buying dumb terminals.
>I don't see much advantage in using something like an IBM PC
>as a terminal emulator (unless you happen to already have one),
>but the Blit/DMD (Xerox, Sun, etc.) approach is another story.

The problem I have with the 5620 is that for the price, I can get
a Mac or an Amiga or an Atari 1040ST, a hard disk, software, etc,
and have something to play with when the VAX is down.  With a
5620 all I can do is run diagnostics, which gets stale after a
few hours! :-)

Next year for the price of a 5620, I hope to be able to get a 68020
based Mac or Amiga or Atari, which would probably have as much power
as the fraction of the VAXes time that gets devotes to me.  Then it
starts to get hard to justify the cost.  Now if they would put a
hard disk on the 5620...
-- 
Tim Smith       sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim || ima!ism780!tim || ihnp4!cithep!tim