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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
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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.