Setting up a Sparcstation lab.

[Chris Johnson]

>It seems to me that 12 is a bad compromise.  Either you limp along with 8
>or you go whole-hog for 16.  The German Sun Users' group electronic
>mailing list had a discussion about xview News/X and memory; 12M wasn't
>quite enough.  The consensus was that future SunOS releases are going to
>want 16M in a compiling environment and at least 12 MIPS.

Did this (and similar articles) strike anyone like it hit me?  I started
using Sun workstations with a 2/120.  I could run compiles with 4 or 5
windows open, plus 2 more processes off the asynch. comm.  ports, and it
only had 2 (two) Mb of memory.  Sure, it had to do more than a little
swapping, but it did work.

More and more, I get the feeling that either system developers (1and not
just the OS groups at Sun) are getting very spoiled by the ability to have
lots of memory, or they are just becoming incompetent.

Yes, yes, I know all about the arguements of cost of memory versus cost of
development time, and so forth.  And that's not at all what I'm talking
about, really.  It _IS_ a tradeoff, after all.  But it appears that noone
is considering it for than about 10 seconds, and from the distorted point
of view of "my machine has 32Mb of memory, so certainly 16Mb for a user is
not unreasonable".

Memory may well be becoming cheaper and cheaper, but there is a huge
installed base of machines out there that do _NOT_ handle easy
installation of additional, inexpensive memory!

Frankly, I think it is completely undefensible for SunOS4.0.3 to require
16Mb in a machine that comes with 8Mb standard to function well.
Especially given that SunOS4.0.1 ran in 4Mb, and ran well in 8Mb (albeit
in a Sun 4/260), and further that SunOS3.5 ran well in 2Mb.

I know there are lots of bright, talented programmers at Sun.  In fact,
there's quite a few of them who are good friends of mine, who I would call
damn good programmers.  But apparently there is a lack of them in OS
group.  I'd be embarassed to admit I had a hand in such a grossly
overweight, lumbering operating system!

How do you feel about this?  Am I over the hill at 32 and 14 years of
experience, trying to write efficient, compact code?  Or do we have too
many young brats, spoiled by megabytes of memory?

Having seen Unix source code, and having seen what happens to systems
which are enhanced and modified by many people over many years (this fits
Unix and SunOS to a "T", folks), I can just imagine the number of new
features that were added by people who avoided the difficulty of finding
out what was already available and how it worked, and instead, just added
lots more data structures and code, instead of reusing or generalizing
existing software.

Incidentally, this obviously goes for applications software, as well.  In
fact, this very issue has been editorialized and discussed at length in
the IBM PC clone/MS-DOS world.  I'm not sure, but I suspect X Windows is a
serious pig in this department.

Chris Johnson                     UUCP:  chris at c2s.mn.org
Com Squared Systems, Inc.         ATT:  +1 612/452-9522