Workstations - how are they used?

[Guy Harris]

> How do people apply high-powered work stations in software development? ...
> or if there were some sort of windowing facility a la blit, I could see how
> it might be a win. But in general, the technology that the Iris, a Sun, or
> any of the other graphics workstations offer seems to be very expensive for
> what it adds to the general-purpose UNIX user.

Well, the Sun *does* have "some sort of windowing facility a la BLIT".  *I*
certainly find it comes in handy, and the company I work for provides one to
all its programmers and documenters, so it obviously must consider it worth
providing its programmers with Sun workstations :-).  There's a fancy
front-end to "dbx" called "dbxtool" running here, which from the description
looks very nice (one could, presumably, make some sort of screen-oriented
front end for a timeshared mini + CRT terminal, but the ability to run the
debugger and the debugee in a separate window makes it a lot nicer); I
haven't used it (having barely started using "dbx" - I used "sdb" prior to
that for reasons you really don't want to know) so I can't say much more
about it.

Yes, it's expensive (although it'll get less so with advancing chip
technology).  It'll get more cost-effective as more powerful development
tools are produced which make use of the single-user CPU and bit-mapped
display/mouse.  People probably considered cursor-addressible CRT terminals
running at 9600 baud expensive for the general-purpose user at one point in
the past.

	Guy Harris