cpc@AMES-NAS.ARPA (Chuck Collins) (05/07/85)
I have a simple question: what is it that people use workstations for?
I have occasional access to a Silicon Graphics Iris workstation running
UNIX Sys V. Aside from showing off the F-15 flight simulator to visitors
and displaying my prompt in magenta, I usually use the workstation to call
up a nearby VAX over ethernet and do things on the VAX that I could do from
my Kimtron at home.
How do people apply high-powered work stations in software development? If
I were heavily involved in producing graphics applications on its display,
or if there were some sort of windowing facility a la blit, I could see how
it might be a win. But in general, the technology that the Iris, a Sun, or any
of the other graphics workstations offer seems to be very expensive for what
it adds to the general-purpose UNIX user. Do others have similar or contrary
views?
Chuck Collins cpc@ames-nas {ihnp4,hplabs}!ames!amelia!cpcguy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris) (05/09/85)
> How do people apply high-powered work stations in software development? ... > or if there were some sort of windowing facility a la blit, I could see how > it might be a win. But in general, the technology that the Iris, a Sun, or > any of the other graphics workstations offer seems to be very expensive for > what it adds to the general-purpose UNIX user. Well, the Sun *does* have "some sort of windowing facility a la BLIT". *I* certainly find it comes in handy, and the company I work for provides one to all its programmers and documenters, so it obviously must consider it worth providing its programmers with Sun workstations :-). There's a fancy front-end to "dbx" called "dbxtool" running here, which from the description looks very nice (one could, presumably, make some sort of screen-oriented front end for a timeshared mini + CRT terminal, but the ability to run the debugger and the debugee in a separate window makes it a lot nicer); I haven't used it (having barely started using "dbx" - I used "sdb" prior to that for reasons you really don't want to know) so I can't say much more about it. Yes, it's expensive (although it'll get less so with advancing chip technology). It'll get more cost-effective as more powerful development tools are produced which make use of the single-user CPU and bit-mapped display/mouse. People probably considered cursor-addressible CRT terminals running at 9600 baud expensive for the general-purpose user at one point in the past. Guy Harris