readline bashing (was POSIX bashing)

[Ed Gould]

>	A good friend of mine has this theory that computers today
>are really no more useful than the woefully "obsolete" ones we see
>in the computer museum - by the time you factor in the amount of
>sheer gunk they're wasting their time doing (painting nifty-keen 3-d
>widgets, etc, etc, etc) and the sheer human cost of *understanding*
>all that gunk, they are no faster, no more cost effective, and no
>more capable at doing "real work" than they used to be. Of course,
>that's an utterly insane argument, isn't it?

If you have all that gunk in there - particularly if you have it
embodied in one of the current implementations like X or DECwindows -
it's true.  Today's machines don't get any more real work done
than did yesterday's.  But they sure work harder at getting it
done.

There are, however, alternatives.  Some are available; others are
proprietary, but we would do well to learn from them.  The two I
think of in particular as I write this are MGR, written at Bellcore
and available, and the Plan 9 stuff at Bell Labs.  Both of those
window systems have more than adequate graphics capabilities, but
don't eat their server alive (except, of course, where the server
is the terminal and is designed to be consumed by the window system).

Some of us remember getting real work done on PDP-11s.  (Actually,
some of got real work done even before there *was* a PDP-11.)
That's right, 64KB address spaces (128KB if you were lucky and had
an 11/45 or 11/70, and had a good balance between code and data),
about three-quarters of a MIPS at best, and we shared them with
others.  Yup - they were usually timesharing machines.  We got as
much done with an ASCII terminal connected to a well-configured
11/70 shared with 20 users as on a one user workstation today.  We
worked a bit harder, not having multiple windows and all that, but
we got a lot done.  Of course, the kernel fit into one (well,
actually, two on the 11/70) of those 64KB address spaces back then,
too.

I know that there are a lot of things that legitimately need more
than 64KB (even the worlds smallest fully-functional Unix kernel -
the one at Bell Labs research - is larger), but most of the things
that take more than that do so because they're bloated with excess
goo, badly coded, or - most likely - both.

-- 
Ed Gould			No longer formally affiliated with,
ed at mtxinu.COM			and certainly not speaking for, mt Xinu.

"I'll fight them as a woman, not a lady.  I'll fight them as an engineer."