Day 2 of Usenix

[Dave Mason]

This is going to be short.  As mentioned in another note, 3 hours of typing
disappeared....sigh...
- Steffan & Veach (Bell Labs) EMACS editor shell.

- Dave Korn (Bell Labs) Bourne shell extension. Uses editor above or vi for
	history editing.  Job control where OS supports.  Only problem:
	the accronym..as someone pointed out: Real Programmers don't use
	KiScHe! 
- Zelitzky & Srivastava (National Semi) talked about EPascal and C compilers
	for 16000. Not as polished as others but good info content.  Included
	info on 16000 module hardware.
- Ross (ANDYNE) & Taylor (DCIEM) talked about Unix extensions to provide real-
	time support.  Unlike the standard approach (particularly on RSX etc.)
	the program & OS make a contract of the form (from the program view):
	"I promise not to use more than X seconds of CPU time in the next Y
	seconds if you (the OS) promise to make sure that I will get X sec of
	CPU in the next Y seconds."  The scheduler at any point runs the process
	that is the closest to exceeding its deadline, and the OS contract
	negotiator only accepts contracts that it knows it can meet.
- Cordy & Holt (UofToronto) talked about Turing, a new Pascal derivative now
	being used for introductory CS courses.  It is designed toward several
	goals: easy to teach/learn, formal verification, reliability,
	efficiency, interaction.  The surprising thing is that it seems to meet
	the goals (yes I am from UofT, but I AM impressed).
- Tanenbaum, van Staveren & Keizer (Free University, Amsterdam) talked about
	portable compilers.  This is a revival of the UNCOL ideas where with
	L languages & M machines, one writes L front ends to produce
	intermediate code and M code generators to read the intermediate code.
	The system looks interesting (producing C & Pascal compilers) but slow.
	The optimizations can be disabled to speed things up, and there is
	an interpretter for the intermediate language (called EM).
- Then we got to the Unix directions session.
- Rob Pike (Bell Labs) gave a good talk on creeping featurism and how it was
	bogging down Unix.  4.2 kernel is ~10 times the size of the V5 kernel,
	and Rob sees this as a symptom.
- Jim Balter (INTERACTIVE Systems) talked about differences between System III
	and System V.  Seemed like a lot of incompatibility for not much gain.
- Chambers & Quarterman (UofTexas-Austin) compared 4.1c & System V.  It is
	rumoured that these systems both evolved from something called V7.  If
	this is indeed the case, it must have happened sometime before we came
	down from the trees, cuz there sure are a lot of differences now.
- Mike O'Dell (UCBerkeley) talked about when 4.2 is coming out...a year or so,
	except it's called 4.3, and a subset called 4.2 is already on the way,
	or at least the licenses agreements are.  There have been several
	personnel changes and it will take a while to get everything straight.
- Then there was a Unix Futures Panel chaired by Mike Tilson (UCR) and with
	Pike, Balter, O'Dell and Denis Ritchie (Bell Labs).
	There was a lot of discussion and I am a little short of time, but
	my overall impression was not very positive.  Everybody seemed to agree
	that Unix is THE system of the present, and the base of the systems of
	the future, and that Unix is going to continue to gain features (tho
	as mentioned above that isn't neccessarily good) but that it has reached
	maturity and will slowly slip into senility.  Yet more evidence that
	maturity is here is the fact that there were about 1500 people at the
	conference.  One possible future that Unix is related to is the use of
	things like the BLIT/5620, but the future will be held off until the
	price starts to become more reasonable.

Well I gotta go, so I remain, with asbestos sheet :-)

 -- Gandalf's flunky Hobbit --   Dave Mason, U. Toronto CSRG,
        {cornell,watmath,ihnp4,floyd,allegra,utzoo,uw-beaver}!utcsrgv!mason
     or {cwruecmp,duke,linus,lsuc,research}!utzoo!utcsrgv!mason   (UUCP)