afgg6490@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (11/27/89)
>No one needs a computer of any performance level on his desk. What one >needs is a modern windowing terminal on a desk, connected to the >computer in the computer room with a connection of suitable bandwidth to >handle the drawing on the screen. The Killer Micros and striped disk farm >belong in the computer room where fan noise and heat does not bother anyone. >A Killer Micro on ones desk is just a waste of a Killer Micro, along with >a uselessly small main memory size. The utilization of such a machine is so >low it is hard to measure reliably. I mainly agree with you, for people in an institutional or corporate environment. Where the employer is paying for computing support, it makes sense to centralize the support, share expensive high performance disks and climate control, mundane system administration tasks, and interface via high performance nets to bitmapped graphics terminals and other such peripherals. (Back at Gould I tried in my own little way to make the company see this. No luck - but then, we were only a minisuper, not a Killer Micro (but we had a pretty good I/O system).) Systems like the SUN/River (fiber optics to [VE]GA screens) and X terminals begin to approach this... The impediments are mainly poltical: many workgroups bough PCs not because they were cost effective, but because they didn't need to negotiate with the MIS staff to use them. Same story applies to centralized Killer micros. Having done my undergrad at a university with a big central MIS system, I heartily understand this motivation. But having recently worked at a site with a centralized administration that was cooperative and supportive (yay Bruce Z., Bill S., Judy B. !) I would rank things: BEST: centralized administration with cooperation OK: decentralized PCs WORST: centralized systems with adversarial relationships ("MIS") But, two disagreements: (1) even in the centralized system - people want local mass storage (tapes, preferably mountable disks), and other I/O. Being able to manage your own storage can make an adversarial system tolerable - since disk space is nearly always the first thing you run out of. DREAM: an NCD X-terminal with a NeXT type optical disk (preferably some faster unit of dismountable local mass storage (and if your UNIX isn't secure in the face of user-mountable volumes, fix it!)) (2) Not all users are institutional. Like me, for instance. Since I left Motorola, I've been working from home - and it sure would be nice to have one of those "Killer Micros" with a fast I/O system in my home-office. Except that I doubt that I could afford 100 or more spindles - somebody has got to do something for small system I/O performance. DREAM: next time I go back to work, I'll buy one of this year's killer micros...