🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <40u3df$ltt@sundog.tiac.net> Jim Williams, williams@tiac.net
writes:
>kcbrown@starfruit.csd.sgi.com (Kevin Brown) wrote:
>>>OTOH, by waiting until the mid-1990's to do their design work, they've 
>>>got 10 more years of experience from the computing industry to draw
>>>on.
>>
>>This is true.  However, with respect to the important items I'm
>>thinking of (the two PM's), the software technology has been around
>>for a long time.
>>
>>I suppose, however, that the 10 years have been useful in highlighting
>>which OS features really are useful.
>>
>
>I'm a bit confused on if you are discussing OS or GUI features, but I am
>strongly of the opinion that there are a number of very basic OS features
>which were well understood in excess of 20 years ago and which neither
>Apple nor Microsoft (nor IBM) had any excuse for omitting.  The most
>obvious of which is a reasonable schedular.  Multitasking is just too
>basic, too well understood, and too small to leave out.  I couldn't
>understand it when the Peanut came out as the PC, and I can't understand
>it now.  The only conclusion I can reach is that no one developing these
>OS had bothered to read any textboooks on writing OS.
>

Well let's see. The first versions of UNIX omitted DLLs, graphics, 
threads and SMP from the OS. All pretty well understood basic stuff I 
would say. Gee, those UNIX designers must have been real idiots. I'm sure 
it had nothing to do with the fact that the OS they were designing had 
the same sort of memory constraints as the original mac.

Now lets look at most of the current UNIXs out there. 
They generally don't support SOM style objects for user extension of the 
system. They don't support multiple forks per file (also known as 
file properties) --- heck they should hav eth file system as an object 
database like a real OS. They don't have multiple language/script support 
at the API level, nor the tools such a system needs---international 
data/time/number support, sorting support (including really weird stuff 
like Japanese sorting via the PRONUNCIATION of a string rather than the 
characters in the string). Heck they don;t even have the most minimal 
tools such a system needs, a graphics line layout engine that can handle 
multiple scripts.
They have the mechanisms of IPC, but no common vocabulary (except for 
such limited things as TCL/Perl/csh) ie nothing akin to AppleEvents.
They don't have network VM support that allows processes and data 
transparently to move across machines.

So I guess the conclusion we come to is that everyone involved with UNIX 
is an idiot.

Maynard