Amos Shapira wrote: > Keep an eye for Andy S. Tannenbaum's keynote at LCA this morning on > http://lca2007.linux.org.au/Programme#head-6af3ad9cefbbb05127e86c3d2f00c2542a1bb75e > (I'm sure the slides/audio/video will show up later). He talks > exactly about this - how his PDP-11 with 64kb RAM used to boot in 4 > seconds while his top-of-the-line Xeon server takes two minutes to > boot, or how a VAX shared among 80 users and with 1 Mb of ram gave > good service to all of them.
Maybe I'm looking young, but I'm old enough to have the (great) experience to administer (in my past as a child) such a PDP-11 (model 34 with 128KB and 12 terminals). Everything worked great and fast. And you never had to wait for the computer, even when there were 12 simultaneous users. Since that computer served a school, the total number of users was higher (about 60), and the operating system was not small, so we had to upgrade our 5MB RL01 disk to 10MB RL02 disk. The programs were tiny so their quality was near-perfect. And even in the rare case of a bug, it was a piece of cake to debug, not only because the programs were smaller and easier, but also because they were "flowchart-based" and not "event-based" (with a huge mainloop that serves everything, a model that is main responsible for the spaghetti look of today's code). The programs were also friendlier, because all the options in the (limited) UI/menus/etc were textual, in simple English, and not graphical icons that you must be a genious to guess what the programmer meant. If icons were really friendlier than text, it could be useful in other fields of life; For example, instead of speaking to each other, we could use pantomime. Fortunately, nobody is so cruel to force the people to communicate in pictures (except for UI "experts" who force the programmers to over-use graphics). I have clear explanation for what has happened since then, but I don't want to enter flaming wars. -- Eli Marmor Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. __________________________________________________________ Tel.: +972-9-766-1020 8 Yad-Harutzim St. Fax.: +972-9-766-1314 P.O.B. 7004 Mobile: +972-50-5237338 Kfar-Saba 44641, Israel ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
