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From: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.group
Subject: Re: About nuking newsgroups:
Message-ID: <1014@nsc.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 3-Jun-84 12:27:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: nsc.1014
Posted: Sun Jun  3 12:27:32 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 5-Jun-84 20:22:12 EDT
References: <221@homxa.UUCP> <452@denelcor.UUCP>
Organization: The Warlocks Cave
Lines: 42

>But the real question of virtual addressing will bite you in the end.
>Sure, you can still do alot without it. But the limitations are too
>great. Why isn't there anyone using PDP-8's to read news? or 8080's?
>I think that you ought to at least upgrade to a 32 bit machine. At
>least while you can still unload your PDP's; Soon nobody may want them.

>					Dave Anderson  201-949-5552

Good grief. Let us face some facts here. First, PDP's are still being sold.
PDP's run Unix. Usenet is basically a Unix based piece of software (with
minor exceptions). The reason PDP-8's and 8080's don't run news is
basically because they don't run Unix. If they did we'd probably try to
support them as well.

This is NOT VAXnet. This is NOT BSDnet. This is USENET. The software that
we publish needs to be portable so that it can reach the widest possible
audience. If it doesn't we are artificially crippling the network. What you
are telling us to do is basically the same as suggesting that a person
write a program for the IBM PC but require that the PC have 512K instead of
128K so that you can do everything. Any marketing person will tell you that
you are cutting your own throat. True, if you DO have 512K you should be
able to do more (or better), but you don't ignore the much larger market of
128K machines because of it. You figure out how to get the software to do
it slower or with a little less functionality or something. You don't tell
people to blindly upgrade unless you absolutely have to. (What you do is
get them hooked onto the thing and then let them talk themselves into the
upgrade after the fact).

Anyone who honestly things they can ignored PDP's has no idea how many of
them are still out there. They also seem to ignore the trend to
workstations and smaller personal machines, not every one of which is going
to try to simulate vaxes. Massive addressing spaces is for the lazy
programmers who don't want to have to think about things like structure and
efficiency (both of which are sometimes amazingly lacking in usenet
software at times).

chuq

-- 
From the closet of anxieties of:			Chuq Von Rospach
{amd70,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4}!nsc!chuqui			(408) 733-2600 x242

I'm sure I have my death ray in here somewhere...