Opinions & Biases
ucbvax!works
In my original message that seems to have touched off this recent
debate I was not trying to advocate the development of a portable
TOPS-20 for personal computers, nor did I feel the need to point out
the continuing annoyance of UNIX command naming practices.
I believe the theory offered by Mike O'Dell is certainly true but of
little relevance to my original concerns. Someone here at ISI pointed
out that computers are extremely good at re-educating their users to
new commands and/or procedures, it only takes a few trys at using
file-name completion on UNIX to learn that it doesn't work!
I think the real point is that when standing at the crossroads that
many of us are, in terms of changing our present computing
environments, it is a serious mistake to be content to trade one
traditional operating system for another. In the past this was not
the case; It was entirely reasonable to trade TOPS-10 for TENEX/TOPS-20,
or RSX/RSTS for UNIX, it is probably still reasonable to trade VMS for
UNIX. I don't know the options for 68000 based systems, but you get
the idea. It is not reasonable however to trade TOPS-20 for UNIX or
vice-versa, each has virtues the other lacks and when faced with a
user community that is comfortable in one or the other, the only way
to convince them the change is for the better is to offer them
something MUCH BETTER. The general feeling seems to be that this
means bit-mapped displays, mice, multiple windows, and reasonable
tools for the manipulation of these things.
My concern is that UNIX doesn't provide a suitable foundation for
building this environment (I don't think TOPS-20 does either!). One
way to insure that you build an entirely new environment is to pick
some hardware that all the old stuff doesn't work on (SPICE on PERQ's eg)
the other way is to use the same old hardware, but with an entirely
new operating system (seems like UNIX started this way).
It may well be that it requires an effort on the scale of the STAR to
accomplish this, but if that is the case we should admit it, and not
pretend that we're entering the new-age of computing with SUN
terminals running UNIX.
- Joel Goldberger -