Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!godot!johnl From: johnl@godot.UUCP Newsgroups: net.arch Subject: Re: Re: B1700 Message-ID: <428@ima.UUCP> Date: Wed, 17-Oct-84 23:35:22 EDT Article-I.D.: ima.428 Posted: Wed Oct 17 23:35:22 1984 Date-Received: Fri, 19-Oct-84 06:36:24 EDT Lines: 0 Nf-ID: #R:ccice2:-48600:ima:4600003:000:761 Nf-From: ima!johnl Oct 17 10:10:00 1984 I used a B1700 for a while, too. It gave me the distinct impression of having been designed by 3 geniuses, who gave us arbitrary bit addressing, swappable microcode, and such, but then implemented by 10,000 idiots who built an unpleasant card-oriented batch operating system on top of it. (And yes, I used the CANDE terminal monitor, which confirmed my opinion about the card-oriented batch system -- it was often faster to get up, go over to the keypunch, punch some cards, and feed them in than to wait for terminal response. And there was just 1 terminal. Sigh.) John Levine, ima!johnl PS: Talk about tesselation buffers, which are not cheap, tends to confirm the hypothesis that for general computing allowing arbitrary byte alignment isn't worth it.