Asri-unix.1190
net.works
utzoo!decvax!cca!sri-unix!FISCHER@RUTGERS
Thu Apr 8 13:40:08 1982
What's a nanosecond here or there...
From: Ron Fischer <FISCHER RUTGERS AT>
DPR brings out the important point to consider in this discussion of
CPU speeds, it is not the CPU, but the IO speed that (usually)
determines how fast your software will execute. But beyond this I
think there's a more important distinction to be made. Barring truly
unbearable situations CPU speed is just not that important. Most
people on this list sound like sports car fanatics!
A bit of reminiscing... back in 1976 when personal computers were just
starting to be sold in poorly designed kits one of the loudest cries
could be summed up by: "Who cares if it takes 1 minute or 5 minutes to
finish running the program, the computer's cheap, it's mine and no one
else can sporadically slow it down or crash it." The workstation
concept seems to embody the ideas of the latter part of the statement,
we all want our own computers.
So, although all of this wonderful hardware is going to let us do
really "fun things" even faster, shouldn't we be talking about what
those "fun things" are going to be? How about some more general
issues?? What can people do with a workstation that would be
impractical or silly to do with a mainframe? (besides play Pacman...)
What software techniques can take advantage of all those extra cycles
lying around? Are there better physical designs other than keyboard,
mouse, and display? Maybe workstations should be more like desks or
chalkboards, or perhaps even more like notebooks (Dynabook, hurrah!)?
Are there better architectures for personal machines (cringe)?
Religious arguments, ones that are unanswerable or based on
preference, don't qualify as "fun things" either... what should a
workstation's language or OS do? How should it support a bitmap
display? Who cares about the sundry specifics of existing stuff, take
the useful concepts and go from there. Performance measurements can
tell us if a system was implemented "stupidly," but they can only hint
that we took the wrong approach in the first place. Creativity makes
"adequately fulfilled" into "amazingly better."
Hit that mental "meta key!"
(ron)
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