karl@grebyn.UUCP (02/02/86)
[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.