[geeks] Needed: A good sparc workstation

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 03:33:43AM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
>
> It largely hasn't.  There's no reason a mail client (Alpine, in my case)
> should require 28MB of memory to display a summary of a mailbox whose
> total footprint is 3.3MB.  There's no good reason why a web browser
> (Safari 3) should eat up 350MB of memory to display a 20MB HTML file[0].
>
> Except for the reason that most programmers are lazy and costly.

That's reason enough for me. Since I am not going to write all of the
programs I use, I have to rely upon what people write. 

If I want to surf the web, I have to use a web browser and that limits
my choice to I.E. which I have so far avoided, FireFox or Safari.
If I had a desire to access Israeli sites, I would have to use I.E., 
99% of them including all of the government sites are IE only.

If I want to do word processing, I certainly can do it with MicroEmacs
(I'm using it now), but for fancy stuff, or to read things sent to me it's
got to be Office. M/S or Open, I'm not sure which is a bigger pig.

I must admit, I've moved away from using Mutt and Microemacs, which I have
been using since 1991, to Apple's Mail.app and gmail. I still use the old
stuff for personal email, and since this list is text based, kept it there
too, but the "crap" email I get, such as Yahoo lists, etc moved. 




>
> At the other end of the spectrum, I frequently converse with a fellow
> whose footprint for all his work that is approximately the size of the
> original IBM PC's ROM, and it has to do useful (modern) work, and he
> shares it with three other programmers.


I'm not surprised, I've written meaningful code on all sorts of machines,
including the IBM 1130, HP2000, both of which had less memory and a slower
processor than the original IBM PC, and on system 370's, CD 6400's, Bouroughs
computers (the original Algol based computer) and so on.

> It's amazing what you can do when you have to count your code in
> instructions rather than classes.

Hey, I remember when the IBM 370 came out with mvcl which allowed you
to move up to 16 megabytes of data (far more than the RAM anyone had),
instead of 256 that an MVC did. Of course that was because I am an old
assembly language programmer who clears out arrays and variables before
using them, something long fallen out of fashion.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM