Amdahl UTS vs. Unix/V and Berkeley 4.2

[G A Moffett]

In article <5383 at brl-smoke.ARPA> lacasse at RAND-UNIX.arpa writes:

> 
> 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.
> 

It is 4K bytes.

> It had some unusual conventions, like a standard directory in everyone's
> home directory called "...", where .login, .cshrc, .profile, etc.
> ad infinitem were located.  This is a fine idea, but I'd rather AT&T
> or Berkeley made such major inovations.

Aha!  You are describing our older product, UTS 2.x.  UTS/580 today
is quite conventional in its following of the System V standard.
However, many programmers here liked the ... directory, too, and now
use it for other purposes now.

> The executables, especially a minimum executable (compiled a.out of
> hello_world.c) were ususually large.

If you are using printf(3) (as the conventional "hello, world" does),
you are bringing in a lot of formatting and I/O code.  I just wrote
a "hello, world" using write(2), which turned out to be only 468 bytes
(stripped).

> It was quite fast, and had good floating point and integer benchmarks.

Yes!  Yes!  Yes!

> They may have made dramatic improvements since then.

Fer shure!

>                                                       I'd advice you
> pay careful attention to the full duplex tty issue.

I'm writing this article on my Macintosh, dialed in to UTS at 2400
baud (over a modem), using vi(1).  You'd think you were on a Vax
except it isn't so horribly slow -- ever.

I think the reason UTS hasn't gotten more popular is simply that
not enough people know about it!
-- 
Gordon A. Moffett                             {whatever}!amdahl!gam

 ~ See the soldier with his gun ~
 ~ Who must be dead to be admired ~
--
[ The opinions expressed, if any, do not represent Amdahl Corporation ]