Text File

Aucbvax.6518 fa.works utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works Mon Mar 15 19:20:05 1982 ethernet, unix >From DPR@Mit-Xx Thu Mar 11 12:00:52 1982 Ethernet: People are comparing apples and oranges here. Ethernet has had a long period of testing in the field. If you want to buy a technology that's known to work, buy Ethernet. Broadband data nets (not broadcast cable video) now being "announced" by venture companies, and even Wang, are all promise... I'd get a contract that let me sue if they don't satisfy my needs if I were to risk my company on those technologies (they may be "better" eventually, but that is only one aspect of considering them--would you buy a BART?) Most of the technical "differences" advertised by manufacturers fall into the "brand differentiation" area here -- when all is said and done, looking at the whole system, the approaches probably will all work about equally well. whose snake oil do you buy?

UNIX: It sure is nice not to have to build an operating system for each machine you build. Thus hardware makers will love UNIX. On the other hand, the concept of an "operating system" is obsolete. What is needed for workstations or any other computer is a set of easy to use primitives for manipulating the kinds of abstractions that are of interest in building applications. For many of the things I used to do, MACLISP (interlisp as well) is the programming system of choice. Many users had built a huge library of wonderful primitives for data structuring, debugging, screen managment, ... If it runs on UNIX, fine. But I'd never use UNIX raw for those things.

UNIX is good at streaming-file-oriented processing (in fact it makes I/O devices look like files so that the file-oriented tools can work on character streams from other sources). For objects not structured as byte streams (databases, knowledge rep systems, window management systems, simulation modelling, video game construction, robot control, ...) UNIX provides no help. In fact, since UNIX provides rather clumsy processes and access to I/O, UNIX can't easily be perverted to do these things.

At times it becomes useful to attack established dogma. UNIX is an embodiment of a lot of clever ideas that comprise a model of what computing is. I assert that computing for the 80's is best treated by a radically different model or set of models. Little or nothing is contributed by UNIX and C other than a programming system that might be used with the intent of throwing it away when the better ideas jell into practical systems.

----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> 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.