USENET (USENIX) Makes InformationWEEK

[karl at grebyn.UUCP]

[They at least got a few things correct... :-)]

>From the January 27 edition of InformationWEEK, p. 10:

		Usenet Focuses on Windows, Mainframes

   Windows, mainframes, and the federal government were the main
topics of discussion as the Unix wizards ot the world gathered in
Denver for the 10th annual Usenet technical conference.  Few of the
leading-edge ideas presented in Usenet papers will find their way into
corporation MIS shops in the near future, but they do indicate the
strategic directions in which Unix is heading.

   A concern of all the speakers in the windowing sessions was how to
increase the responsiveness of their systems while lowering system
overhead.  The general solution seemed to be to offload the window
management tasks on processors other than the one performing the main
computing.  The "window server" should be dedicated to managing the
windows themselves, independent of the applications running in them.
Opinions diverged, however, on whether that server should be in the
terminals or in a satellite computer.

   A whole day of Usenet was give to "Unix on Big Iron," on machines
up to and including Cray Research Inc.'s Cray-2.  Amdahl Corp.
discussed its experience in porting Unix to the System/370 Extended
Architecture, and talked about full duplex support of Unix on
mainframes by packetizing the echoed characters.  Alliant Computer
Corp. made presentations on running Unix on multiple processors,
particularly the scheduling problems the operating system presents in
that environment.