Aucbvax.6492 fa.works utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works Mon Mar 15 06:53:04 1982 Unix really isn't the answer >From Mishkin@Yale Wed Mar 10 20:51:16 1982 I think there are two basic reasons people feel uncomfortable with the idea of "personal machine Unix": (1) Unix is not interactive; the shell and the software tools were designed to be "programmable" (i.e. fit well together, not with the user). What use is a personal RJE station? (2) Unix has developed out of a limited-resource environment; there's just so much you can fit into a 64K address space. For reasons unclear to me, it seems that Berkeley Unix still is bit-stingy. Is this because of how paging works in Berkeley Unix? At the other extreme, there is Tenex/TOPS-20. It is about as interactive as a timesharing can get. It never suffered (or benefited) from an attitude of "gee, we better not put this in the monitor since we might run out of address space". Given a choice of either extreme of featurefullness for my personal machine, I would take the TOPS-20 attitude. But let's face it, this isn't going to fly on a 256K machine. If you want all the zippy features available without paging to death, you're going to need 2M. I don't mean to sound so anti-Unix, it's just that people seem to have accepted Unix so uncritically as the model for the future; its warts have been painted over, not removed. It's time for major surgery. Let's take the good ideas and move on. ------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.