🚀 go-pugleaf

Stan, Stan, Stan...

>Is desktop, network, bitmapped-display UNIX computing a fad?

>Probably.  As long as you are just doing terminal-emulation in several
>windows, you might just as well have two or three vt100 terminals and
>job control.

Yea, except that now I can just flick my wrist and be in another system
instead of having to swivel my chair.  Not to mention all the desk space
that all those vt100s would take.  I can also easily copy things like
text from one window (system) to another when I need to type something
that I just typed.

>I seriously doubt that networked Macintosh users are too worried about
>whether about whether they should go back to traditional timesharing,
>but at the same time if I am typing troff commands into a UNIX
>workstation, then I might as well be using GCOS.

I try to stay as far away from troff as I can (LaTeX is so much nicer :-).
The fact is, though, there are some really nice WYSIWYG editors and page
layout programs coming out for workstations.  Software seems to be the
problem.  It just isn't (software people are screaming can't) be written
fast enough to take advantage of the hardware.

>The problem is that workstations are not enough like Macintoshes and
>vice versa.

Well, I have a Mac at home (albeit an old 512K that's downright pitiful)
and I've got to tell you that my workstation is so much nicer.  If I had
a choice of either (ever a new hot [yea, right... an '030 running at <20MHz]
Mac) I'd take the workstation in a minute.  In a sense a fully loaded
Mac is a workstation (but that <20MHz thing really kills me).  If I could
get the software for it that I could for my workstation then there might
not be much to differentiate between the two.

>But UNIX on a desk?  No.  Obviously this is crazy.  The only reason
>UNIX is the operating system of choice for workstations is because it
>was at the right place at the right time.  But that's all water under
>the bridge now.

No way. I disagree completely.  My throughput with some half-assed operating
system like MS/DOS or the Mac OS would be a lot less.  I'm not arguing that
UNIX is the end all OS, but the fact is, it's still the "right time".  There
isn't currently anything that would improve my throughput over UNIX.
I'll admit that a novice user can do much more with something like the Mac
OS faster than a novice UNIX user can.  But in a compute intensive, large
data size, engineering environment, there's just no way that the Mac OS
would hold up.  There were some things that the Mac popularized (note that
I didn't say originate :-) like mice and icons and stuff that certainly
make things nice, but that's why X Windows was created.  It's nice to be
able to grep files when I want to just find a line of data without
having to wait 2 minutes to start the WYSIWYG editor and
scroll through the thing looking for what I want.  It's so much easier
being able to set up an awk or sed filter to send some data through to
make it compatible with the next program that I'm going to use on it,
rather than just not being able to use the next program on it at all.
For a user who just wants to use Pagemaker all day long, a PC (of whatever
sort) is fine, but for someone who needs to do a lot of things all at
once, UNIX is it.

>What next?

Don't know.

>Stan Switzer  sjs@bellcore.com
>----------

The way that I see this discussion is that people are arguing that workstations
or PCs or mainframes are supposed to be good for everybody for some unknown
reason.  The fact is that they all serve their purpose in some way and
we have a need for all of them.  A secretary who is just doing some word
processing doesn't need all the power or data storage of a workstation.
But she certainly needs the interactivity of a PC, as opposed to the skippy
jumpy response afforded by a large mainframe that's also working on an
accounting run.  For me, I need a workstation.  I need a large color bitmapped
display with a fair amount of local disk space and a compute engine that
really hums.  The reason: I need the interactivity and data storage in order
to manipulate large data structures containing things like schematic capture
data.  If I want to do a spice model, I'll farm it out to a crunch machine.

Dave Roberts
HP Fort Collins
dgr@hpfcla.hp.com

No disclaimer... I don't make mistakes.