Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site topaz.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!bellcore!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!columbia!topaz!forwarder From: forwarder@CSNET-SH.ARPA Newsgroups: net.works Subject: 4404 Experiences Message-ID: <2734@topaz.ARPA> Date: Mon, 15-Jul-85 17:24:33 EDT Article-I.D.: topaz.2734 Posted: Mon Jul 15 17:24:33 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 18-Jul-85 05:45:54 EDT Sender: daemon@topaz.ARPA Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 43 From: obrien@CSNET-SH.ARPA Chris Ryland asked for 4404 experiences. I had one of these on my desk for a week a while back. On the whole I was favorably impressed. Here are some notable points: o They've done some nice things to the Smalltalk system. Little things like being able to get at the contents of a Workspace from another workspace, certain predefined variables, etc. o The thing runs on top UNIFLEX, a UNIX "work-alike" system. None of the system calls are the same and none of the commands are the same, but it still looks awfully like a UNIX. o To hold costs down, it has a medium-resolution screen, and hardware pan over the 1Kx1K display space. However, although there is a Smalltalk primitive message to find out what part of the virtual space is currently really on the screen, nobody much really uses that message yet. Result: something can change somewhere that you can't see it, and you won't notice that it's happened. Surprisingly, this doesn't bug me as much as I thought it might. o Speed: it ain't a Dorado. It's maybe 30% faster than a Dolphin, which isn't so very terrible. o Bugs: I found several things wrong. All seem easy to fix and typical of a new product. None seriously hampered my test "work". I don't know what their track record is in actually fixing any of these since we didn't wind up buying one. The one real bogosity noted is that when Smalltalk crashes, it makes a 2Mb core file, though there were 6 Mb on the machine. Hence it seemed to be wasting 4Mb of core. Urk. Some of the options in the System Workspace were therefore able to run the system out of space and crash it. o They fixed the Export Tracer. It now takes about 45 min. instead of 6 hours. Also certain primitives having to do with window painting, etc. seem much snappier than the Dolphin. All in all they seem to know what they're doing, but this is not a world-beating Smalltalk engine yet. Oh yes, it can also run things like Common Lisp and Prolog as options.