Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 18:06:44 -0500 (CDT) From: David Scheidt <dscheidt@enteract.com> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> Cc: Darryl Okahata <darrylo@sr.hp.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Kernel config script: Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96.990601170731.40428A-100000@shell-3.enteract.com> In-Reply-To: <37540155.1BF16326@softweyr.com>
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On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Wes Peters wrote:
> If you mean "lack of competition would make UNIX more homogenous and
> more viable to every Tom, Dick, and Jane that comes down the pike,"
> I will agree with that. I just disagree that this is success. UNIX
> was never meant to be a word processor loader, and complete overkill
> for such an application.
I should point out that UNIX's suitably as a document processing
enviornment is one of the reasons that UNIX received support from
BTL management. The fact that it was stable, ran on cheap hardware,
and a cool programing enviornment were bonuses. My bookshelves at
work are kept from floating away by a bunch of elderly UNIX
documentation{1}, which spend a lot of space describing the tools
that let you write papers and books with the system. Of course,
much of what made UNIX suitable for this sort work also made it
adaptable for all the other things that UNIX boxes do to earn their
keep. Things like the pipe, which make it possible to quickly put
together useful programs, because you have to do so little besides
what you really need to do. Raise your hand if you have a two line
pipeline that replaced an expensive commercial application.
I strongly disagree that UNIX is overkill for any application.
Why shouldn't the user be given a stable, flexible platform to do
their work on? Especially if it is one that makes efficient use
of the hardware the user has, so they needn't buy new hardware
every six months? One of the machines I run -CURRENT on is a 4
year-old Pentium. Other than build times being longer than I would
like, I don't have noticable performance issues. The same machine
is essentially unable to run NT, and do work at the same time.
David Scheidt
{1} Anyone need a copy of the UNIX system V Release 2 User and Programmer
Reference Manuals?
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