CompuServe Messages

I've spent little time using Unix, in the low level sense. I've spent a lot of time at the desk next to the system administrator listening to his comments about Unix; I've had to do some simple development things, where I kept my needs down to assemble, compile, outload to the hardware. I had a nice list of the cmds next to my desk, a bunch of totally indecipherable names to do things (I have little idea what names went with what functions – I called for help when I need to do anything more complex than a file copy). What turns me off about it? It's not realtime (yourselves excluded, of course) so there are a multitude of things it can't manage without extra, very expensive, hardware with it's own processors. In the past (and possibly now) you couldn't install a new device driver withoubringing down the system and re-something or othering it, which I've always felt was a major, major flaw. Especially for a big system! Until the relatively recent advent of a standard for gfx ops (xwindows), the environment was a mishmash of user interfaces, or the abuser interface, the command line. :^) Most implementations are HUGE, and that's a bad sign… I don't need (I don't think anyone needs) tens of megabytes to hold an operating system. OR hundreds. OR even just ten. Storage, both ram and archival, is changing, and this won't be significant for too much longer… but I'd sure like to see something efficient, like OS9 rather than a hog. I've done C compiling and assembling on unix machines, it feels the same as anything else, although for my work, it felt REAL slow… I know that was because it was one big machine for a bunch (70) of people, most of whoom were active. We user Harris Vulcan and somebody elses Unix – from massachusets is all I remember – we saw them a lot (remember I sat next to the system operator). Steve, part of my personal feeling that Unix is a bad deal is that I sit in front of a real-time OS machine, with windows, CLI, development tools, reasonably fast graphics, user installable device drivers, file systems, [ MORE ]