Ware Ware Wizardjin

[Greg Kemnitz]

I suppose my initial response may have been due to inattentive reading of this
thread - sorry about that.

>>Gee, listening to some wizards, you'd think the bad old days had
>>come back when computer time was more important than human time,
>>and Herculian feats of engineering were required to make the computer
>>do much of anything.
>
>That's not the point at all.  The point is that most of the cycles
>used by fancy GUIs don't help productivity - or usability by novices -
>at all.  What they do is paint extra goo on the screen, and they
>do it badly at that.  There are at least two high-powered systems
>for managing bitmapped displays that do not wast all those cycles
>(MGR and Plan 9),  Even the Macintosh makes better use of its
>graphics and processor resources than does X.  Remember the original
>Mac?  It had a fairly slow 68000 (not an '010 or '020) and a *total*
>of 128KB of RAM.  A lot of people got very useful work done on it.
>Many of them were novices.

X now has been elevated to the status of "Standard", and now that this has
happened, there will be little work on such protocols outside of a few
research labs for some time.  Truthfully I don't know whether this is good or
bad; it seems that machines like the Sparc II and DEC 5K have finally gotten
enough moxie to run X well and their prices will be in the "easily affordable"
range in a couple years or less.  Also, the standard means that finally there'll
be the possibility of easy-to-use, graphical software for UNIX that has decent
manuals, regular releases, 24-hour phone support, and enough sales volume to
get the unit price under $1,000.  Only when this happens will UNIX cease to be
a "niche" OS.

When I first encountered X, I thought that it was truely horrible - it was
painfully slow, quite a pain to program, and binaries linked to it tended
to fill up the disk rather quickly, especially as toolkit upon toolkit was 
layered on top of it.  But it appears that it is easier to wait for fast
machines rather than to design standard graphics protocols that aren't bloated,
politically acceptable masses.  Also, it appears that the de facto trend in
industry is to hope hardware improves fast enough to let poorly written
software run well rather than writing software properly, and it is hard to
argue that this strategy has been a complete failure, even if it is a sloppy
approach.

>-- 
>Ed Gould			No longer formally affiliated with,
>ed at mtxinu.COM			and certainly not speaking for, mt Xinu.
>
>"I'll fight them as a woman, not a lady.  I'll fight them as an engineer."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Kemnitz                  |      "I ran out of the room - I
Postgres Chief Programmer     |      didn't want to be killed by a pile
278 Cory Hall, UCB            |      of VMS manuals" :-)
(415) 642-7520                |
kemnitz at postgres.berkeley.edu |      --A friend at DEC Palo Alto in the Quake