🚀 go-pugleaf

>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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