dosread.c again

[Henry Spencer]

In article <9829 at attctc.Dallas.TX.US> chasm at attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Charles Marslett) writes:
> [Unix on small machines]
>
>Come on, I used to work on such machines (PDP-11s, even the older VAXen) and
>they were dogs under Unix...

I worked on such machines for some years.  They weren't exactly Crays, but
the well-managed ones were perfectly acceptable.  Remember what machines
Unix was *invented* on.

>Why do you think so many people used (use?) VMS?

Because they were seduced by DEC propaganda. :-)  Most of the folks I know
who started out using VMS switched to Unix as quickly as they could.

>Unix on a fast 11 might support a compile and two edits...

The ones I worked on did a lot better than that.

>AND YOU SEEM TO HAVE MISSED THE PHRASE: low cost.

I didn't miss it, it's just irrelevant.  Of course hardware costs were
higher fifteen years ago.  The point is, *now* hardware of that caliber
is cheap.  But somehow the software is no longer prepared to exploit it
efficiently.  As Mike O'Dell has observed, somehow the hardware keeps
getting faster but the response time at my keyboard doesn't improve.

>... try to explain why AutoCAD takes 2 MB under DOS, 4 MB under OS/2
>and 7 MB under Xenix to get the same performance...

Incompetence?

Actually, although I don't dismiss the possibility of sheer incompetence,
software bloat is everywhere these days.  As witness the 500KB text editors
that very definitely are *not* 10 times better than the 50KB ones we used
to have.
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu