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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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