Do OS's slow down with age?

[Erland Sommarskog]

Seems like another OS war is blowing up... I just say this this time,
based on my own experience. Some very subjective and unfair comparisons.

The machine I writing this on is VAX780 running 4.3 BSD. The
editor I'm using is Emacs. There doesn't need to be much load,
until I notice a significant delay in such simple things as just
echoing a character. Ah, Emacs, you say. True. But I tried vi 
for fun, and I wasn't free from that there either.

My daily work I do in a VMS cluster on a 8530 (I believe). There
I use TPU. These machines are heavy loaded, yet I almost never
notice delays while editing. It should be added the bottle-necks  
are discs and to some extent memory, which I can notice when
exit the editor and write the file. That can take time, due to
fragmentation and not too many free blocks.

A 8530 vs. a 780 is not fair, but my first impression when I 
started using this machine was that with 20 users this was just
as slow the VMS 780 I was used to from the university when it had
50 users. (VMS V3.)

Finally, the OS itself may slow down with the years, but since it
adds more functionality, you still get the job done faster.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog
ENEA Data, Stockholm              This signature is not to be quoted.
sommar at enea.se