karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) (02/22/89)
In an earlier article, I presented an airplane analogy and said that, if you want to go as fast as possible, you have to give up amenities. I went on to say, essentially, run Unix on your supercomputers to save money on software development, and a bit more which I'll mention later. Brian Jay Gould (gould@pilot.njin.net) replied that he agreed to a point but that performance to the supercomputer user is more important than the cost of the programmer. "In engineering and scientific applications that require a supercomputer, the breakthroughs (or lack of) generated by computational science outweigh the cost of the supercomputer, software, and support staff by an order of magnitude." It sounds like they should be able to easily afford more CPU cycles then, but anyway, Uncle. Sometimes the ultimate speed is required, and one must "pay any price" to achieve it. In the airplane analogy, if the task is air combat, a DC-10 will not suffice, no matter how comfortable it is. In the computer world this means stuff like assembler, microprogramming the array processor, custom hardware, minimalist operating systems, etc. I contend, though, that too often people resort to all sorts of weird hacks when nothing, a better algorithm, or a more powerful machine would have sufficed, and that often the ultimate cost of the hack is much greater than anyone realizes, and if the costs were known, the decision to buy more computer power (or whatever) might seem rather attractive in comparison. Note for example the success of high-level languages, which are almost universally acknowledged as being less efficient in number of CPU cycles consumed for amount of computing done compared to expert assembly hacking, yet most production supercomputer programs are written in FORTRAN, for all well-known advantages thereby gained. I had kind of a dodge in the part of my posting comparing the performance of a RISC workstation to a supercomputer in that I said "scalar MIPS." Although I think some amazingly high performance vector units will be appearing for workstations, supercomputers will continue to have much higher I/O performance. I still think that if a site's supercomputing resources are being spread too thinly, that is, they are being shared by a lot of users running a lot of different programs rather than running a small number of long, difficult to partition (or nonpartionable) programs, workstations may be a win. On the other hand, although the newly emerging workstations of today (and tomorrow) are pushing into certain of the performance capabilities of the much more expensive supercomputers, the newly emerging supercomputers (such as the Cray-3) are themselves vastly more powerful, and will probably reassert a large performance differential versus workstations. -- -- uunet!sugar!karl | "Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is -- karl@sugar.uu.net | watching television." -- David Letterman -- Usenet BBS (713) 438-5018
gph@hpsemc.HP.COM (Paul Houtz) (03/03/89)
karl@ficc.uu.net (karl lehenbauer) writes: >Although the various Unix bashers each have their own ideas of what's better, >none of them provide the vendor and architecture independence of Unix. >If you run AOS, VMS, NOS, CMS, TSO, Multics, MS-DOS, OS/2, etc, *you are >locked in* to a vendor and a product line. If you have a lot of money and >don't care to pay a high premium for hardware and software, that's fine. Careful, Karl. MS-DOS may be sold by one vendor, but it runs on more, different machines than Unix. MS-DOS run more programs than unix, and the number of MS-DOS users dwarfs the number of Unix users. If you want to talk about a de-facto standard, MS-DOS is a better candidate, if you are ONLY interested in not being *locked in* to a given vendors HARDWARE or APPLICATION SOFTWARE.
campbell@redsox.UUCP (Larry Campbell) (03/04/89)
In article <3200001@hpsemc.HP.COM> gph@hpsemc.HP.COM (Paul Houtz) writes: } Careful, Karl. MS-DOS may be sold by one vendor, but it runs on more, }different machines than Unix. MS-DOS run more programs than unix, and }the number of MS-DOS users dwarfs the number of Unix users. Sorry folks, I just couldn't let this one go by. "MS-DOS ... runs on more, different machines than Unix." That's utterly ridiculous. It runs ONLY on Intel 8086-family chips. Period. MS-DOS will *never* run on anything else (sigh, I know about the various software emulations of the 8086, big deal...) By the way, it is my strong contention that there is really no such thing as an MS-DOS user. There are 1-2-3 users, and Word Perfect users, and Autocad users, and dBase users, but these folks don't give a flying fuck whether their application runs under MS-DOS, Multics, or Mach. The real users of systems (as opposed to applications), and by systems I mean the combination of a hardware architecture and operating system environment, are application vendors. The folks who have to write the applications are the ones who are, quite justifiably, fed up with primitive junk like MS-DOS and the 8086 architecture and are pushing hard for 32-bit machines with real operating systems like Mach. The users won't really care until it becomes clear, as it gradually will, that the truly nifty new applications require 32-bit machines with multitasking operating systems. -- Larry Campbell The Boston Software Works, Inc. campbell@bsw.com 120 Fulton Street wjh12!redsox!campbell Boston, MA 02146
vandys@hpcupt1.HP.COM (Andrew Valencia(Seattle)) (03/07/89)
/ hpcupt1:comp.os.misc / campbell@redsox.UUCP (Larry Campbell) / 7:49 pm Mar 3, 1989 / >By the way, it is my strong contention that there is really no such thing as >an MS-DOS user. I'll second that! My wife runs Final Word II and the "tpr" formatter. All she knows is that when she isn't in the editor she types "fw" to be in it, or "tpr" to print off her book. MS-DOS is a non-issue, same as the make of plastic in the keyboard. Andy Valencie ...!hplabs!hpisoa1!vandys
raveling@vaxb.isi.edu (Paul Raveling) (03/07/89)
In article <598@redsox.UUCP> campbell@redsox.UUCP (Larry Campbell) writes: >In article <3200001@hpsemc.HP.COM> gph@hpsemc.HP.COM (Paul Houtz) writes: >} Careful, Karl. MS-DOS may be sold by one vendor, but it runs on more, >}different machines than Unix. MS-DOS run more programs than unix, and >}the number of MS-DOS users dwarfs the number of Unix users. > >Sorry folks, I just couldn't let this one go by. "MS-DOS ... runs on more, >different machines than Unix." That's utterly ridiculous. It runs ONLY on >Intel 8086-family chips. Period. MS-DOS will *never* run on anything else >(sigh, I know about the various software emulations of the 8086, big deal...) It's true that "IBM" PC's have reached lots more users than UNIX systems. The key reasons are: 1. Low cost 2. A well-defined hardware standard [This enabled low cost because of competition!] 3. An adequate file system standard 4. An adequate operating system standard. This isn't to say that I'm enthralled by any of the standards: The 8086-family chips, the limited UNIX-like file system, or the OS interface (originally a CP/M clone, then improved to UNIX-like). IBM and Microsoft could have and should have done better on all of these in the early evolution of PC hardware and software. I'd rate the most significant factor among these as being a hardware standard. In other markets, companies such as DEC and IBM have used the same strategy successfully in lines such as VAXes, PDP-11's, System/360's, and all the assorted child-of-360 mainframes. While I agree that portable operating systems are a good idea, it still seems that hardware engineering has been more adept at portability than UNIX-based software engineering. ---------------- Paul Raveling Raveling@isi.edu
gph@hpsemc.HP.COM (Paul Houtz) (03/09/89)
campbell@redsox.UUCP (Larry Campbell) writes: > In article <3200001@hpsemc.HP.COM> gph@hpsemc.HP.COM (Paul Houtz) writes: >} Careful, Karl. MS-DOS may be sold by one vendor, but it runs on more, >}different machines than Unix. MS-DOS run more programs than unix, and >}the number of MS-DOS users dwarfs the number of Unix users. >. >Sorry folks, I just couldn't let this one go by. "MS-DOS ... runs on more, >different machines than Unix." That's utterly ridiculous. It runs ONLY on >Intel 8086-family chips. Period. MS-DOS will *never* run on anything else >(sigh, I know about the various software emulations of the 8086, big deal...) I apologize for the accidental insertion of the period in the sentence "more, different". It was a typo. In fact, I concur that Unix runs on more, different machines than MSDOS. It is true that MDDOS only runs on the 8086 family. However, MSDOS I contend that more people use MSDOS on more machines than any other operating system. Per your assertion that few people really use MSDOS, rather they use the applications instead, well, I will grant you that. I said in my posting that "MSDOS runs more programs than unix".