Usenix day 1 review

Dave Mason mason at utcsrgv.UUCP
Thu Jul 14 15:01:58 AEST 1983


Just to keep you poor people who aren't attending informed:
  - The opening remarks were the usual sort of thing.
  - Michael Lesk gave an interesting keynote address centred around
     whether Unix was really user friendly or not.  The talk was good overall
     but one of the major points was based on a comparison between a "command
     oriented" system vs. a menu oriented system.  I quote "command oriented"
     because in fact it wasn't, in fact it was a keyword matching system which
     was clearly superior for his application.  Overall though the points were
     well made.
  - This was followed by an un-adulterated sales pitch from WEco.  This was my
     first Usenix conference, so I don't know if it was typical, but judging
     from the hissing from the audience I assume not.  If DEC made such a strong
     sales pitch at a DECUS there would be a substantial uproar.  I nominate
     that if double scheduling of sessions is neccessary next year that this
     session be opposite something dull like Ritchie, Thompson, Joy, etc.
     discussing UN*X futures!
  - I attended part of each of the A & B sessions thereafter.
  - The Holt, Mendell & Perelgut (from UofToronto) paper on TUNIS
     was well presented (though I may be
     biased as I already had seen most of the material & am at UofToronto)
     They were talking about redesigning the Unix nucleus and writing it
     in a high level language with concurrency features (Concurrent Euclid)
     and with potential for proofs of correctness.  The design is very clear.
  - Michel Gien from France then talked about SOL.  It adheres closer to the
     original design of Unix, but was done in basically ISO standard Pascal,
     which neccessitated substantial changes.
  - I moved to the programming tools session:
  - Nakumara & Murai from Tokyo were talking about an extension to the man
     system to include on line help from within programs and general sub-
     stantial increase in speed.  The slides for this were very full and
     moved too fast, but it seemed interesting.
  - Farley, Kunkel & Thompson from Mark Williams then described a very
     advanced C source level debugger that they currently have running on
     Concurrent on the DEC Rainbow.  It sounds like it is probably slow
     right now if you are doing complex things, but it is very ambitious and
     allows a lot of possibilities.
  - I then got lost in the Exhibition area for a while and missed some
     reportedly interesting approaches to the "'make' problem".
  - Wilens from COSI described a port of Unix (called Serix) to the IBM Series
     1 computer, an act that deserves an award for bravery ( and possibly
     something else).  He wasn't very forthcoming about features, but the
     explanation of the architecture from the viewpoint of a Unix-like OS
     was quite interesting.
  - Dunietz & Powell from Microsoft talked about how the Z80 is interfaced
     to the 68000 in the TRS16 to perform the I/O for TRS-XENIX.  Well presented
     and fairly interesting.
  - Laura Neff from National Semiconducter then talked about the port of Unix
     (called Genix) to the 16000 with particular reference to the memory
     management, and the mapping of files to address spaces.
  - There was a BOF session about the Teletype 5620 a.k.a. (although not totally
     correctly) the BLIT.  This is a 1024x800 bit mapped terminal with a
     Belmacs 32 ,256kb and no graphics processor in it.  The hardware is nice
     but nothing spectacular.  The software on the other hand is quite interest-
     ing.  In the most commonly used mode, the terminal can have up to 6 user
     windows simultaneously on the screen.  Each of these can be connected to
     a Unix process on the host, and the creation and destruction of these is
     very nicely handled.  The bad news comes in 2 parts: $6000 and binary only
     support for System 5 only.  The price didn't come in for much discussion,
     but nobody in the room expressed much interest in the binaries only.  As
     this was partly a fishing expedition, hopefully the response will change
     this policy.  Note that all this is preliminary, delivery is December,
     although the price sounded pretty firm.
  - This was followed by a reception at the Ontario Science Centre where all
     and sundry walked in slanted rooms, figured out digital logic, tried to
     make a Votrax say "UNIX", and generally acted like big kids.  A fine
     time was had by all.

	....whew!...I thought I was jotting down a couple lines...oh well,
	hope this is helpful, and hope it doesn't steal all the wind out of
	the sails of the people that did attend from your site.

UNIX is a trademark of ...
XENIX is a trademark...
...

 -- 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)



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