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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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