brad@looking.UUCP (03/23/87)
In article <701@imsvax.UUCP> ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) writes: > While Mr. Holden is correct that many users are quite satisfied with their current equipment and software, and that it serves them well, this is hardly an excuse to condemn different directions of advancement. >Operating systems are the fruits of poverty, a necessary evil >for computers which have to serve many masters. Owning your own >computer obviates any need for real OSs even as acquiring great wealth >obviates any need for techniques of scrimping. Being multi-user is one of the lesser functions of an operating system. It was a nice consequence of multi-tasking which is becoming less important. Not so for the other uses of an OS. The first purpose of an OS is good peripheral management. A good file system that is efficient, plus proper management of other I/O is very important. And while having more than one user on the same machine is less important, having more than one person ACCESS the machine is important. This means almost all the trappings of multi-user systems are necessary, like permissions (and sometimes accounting). The ability to interface to a network is part of all this. It is not used by all (yet), but it must be present or all the rich users will move to the networking system, causing economic destruction for the one that doesn't do it properly. Multi-TASKING can be >achieved in software on a single-user basis quite well without >re-designing your operating system e.g. Mystic Pascal e.g. the article >on concurrency using Turbo Pascal in the 3-86 issue of Dobb's, etc. and >you don't even need an AT or protected modes to do it. Such things as >transferring data and spread-sheeting at the same time can be handled by >these and other kinds of software which are cheap and available NOW. These are kludges that handle special cases, and will never be an adequate solution. The concept of the desk accessory and programs like Sidekick was developed to simulate having more than one program running at the same time on one machine. Such programs under DOS are limited in scope and difficult to implement, and the conflict with one another. One major purpose of a so-called "real" OS is to define means for more than one program to exist at the same time on a single machine. Background data transfer is a simple attempt to acheive what you really want, yet you decry what you really want as evil... > >Then there is the possibility of running UNIX on 286 and 386 machines. >Unix is my OS of choice for machines which for some legitimate reason >HAVE to be multi-user; I can't think of any reason why any sane person >should wish to run it on a single user computer, unless they like slow >performance, clunky and fragile file systems, lack of standardization, >and generally prefer 1976 software, such rubbish as TROFF, VI, ED, YACC >etc. to the software of the present. Unix and other systems have little to do with being multi-user, although I personally make a great deal of use of the multi-user abilities of my Unix machines. While multi-user technology is often slower, it can be made faster. More modern techniques like efficient message passing can make remarkably fast multi-tasking systems. Systems to which networking and piles of other features can be added cleanly and easily. Just because current implementations of Unix don't work this way is no reason to condemn general multi-tasking. I make constant use of it in single-user applications and have trouble getting along without it these days. Memory protection (as in the 286 and 386) is vital to reliable multi-tasking, and reliable multi-tasking is vital to general, proper implementations of networking. Thus the personal, single-person computer revolution isn't quite over yet. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473