roma@uiucuxc.CSO.UIUC.EDU (11/18/86)
> /* Written 4:13 pm Nov 13, 1986 by lacasse@RAND-UNIX.arpa */ > /* ---------- "Re: Amdahl UTS vs. Unix/V and Berke" ---------- */ > > We evaluated UTS for quite a while here, back in 1982 or so. This is my > personal opinion, and not that of Rand. You were evaluating a VASTLY different version of UTS than what is now available. > The biggest problem we had is that our IBM hardware didn't have full > duplex tty lines. We wanted to use screen-oriented software (both that > did, and did not use the curses library). We tried leasing a fancier > full-duplex terminal controller, but it was very expensive. One fellow > here hooked up two tty lines to one terminal, and ran the Rand Editor on > it that way. This was kludgy, and very expensive per-terminal as well. Though we don't currently use it, there is full-duplex software available from Amdahl that will give you full-duplex ASCII terminals with 'vi' and 'curses'. It uses an Amdahl 4705 or IBM 3705 box to do this. I don't know how expensive this is per terminal, but the box doesn't have to be dedicated to UTS. (In other words, you can use it to provide lines in to VM/CMS as well as UTS.) > The file system had a fragment size of either 4 or 8Kbytes (I forget > which). I thought that was a little wasteful of disk space. The file systems were blocked at 4K; I guess this is a bit wasteful, but smaller block sizes are inefficient on fast DASD such as the IBM 3380 -- in fact, I think 4K is considered the optimal blocking for these disks. Based on some things I've read in the code, I'd wouldn't be surprised if UTS eventually allows file systems to be blocked at either 1K, 2K, or 4K. That way, sites could optimize as per their own needs. > It had some unusual conventions, like a standard directory in everyone's > home directory called "...", where .login, .cshrc, .profile, etc. > ad infinitem were located. These unusual conventions are peculiar to the obsolete version of UTS you tried; the current version is a System V standard UNIX and thus behaves as one would expect. > They may have made dramatic improvements since then. Yes, they indeed have. In fact, the current UTS hardly bears any resemblance to the older version you evaluated. Jon Roma Computing Services Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ARPANET: roma%uiucuxc@a.cs.uiuc.edu CSNET: roma%uiucuxc@uiuc.csnet UUCP: {ihnp4,pur-ee,convex}!uiucdcs!uiucuxc!roma