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.
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