From: henry@trilithon.mpk.ca.us (Henry McGilton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy
Subject: A CPU on Every Desk?
Date: 25 Jan 93 19:21:17 GMT
Article-I.D.: trilitho.1993Jan25.192117.2503
Organization: Trilithon Software


As Steve Abell said, ``Oh, how short people's memories are!''.

Anybody who (like me) suffered through that computer industry mass
psychosis of the 1970's called ``time sharing'' while trying to
get software out the door would never want to go back to centralised
anything.  The biggest liberating factor I had in my career was
when I quit using a Control Data 7600 timeshared machine and got
myself a Cromemco Z2 box with a Z80 in it -- mine, all mine!

Unfortunately, I see the disquieting trend back to time sharing,
except it's now called ``client server computing'', as if giving
it a new name changes the result.  In these new bad old days, the
resource being competed for (competition, you understand, NOT
sharing) isn't so much CPU cycles as network bandwidth.  The end
results are the same, though:

    o   the decisions as to what's on your desk and how well (or
	mostly badly) it'll be ``served'' are made by somebody
	other than you.  The person making the decisions usually
	has no accountability and usually doesn't have to suffer
	the same lousy service you're getting.

    o   the administration of the central resource ends up being
	done by what rapidly becomes an elite priesthood of ``gurus''
	and their acolytes.  This elite priesthood rapidly develops
	into a defensive faction with their own agenda which has
	little or nothing to do with providing adequate service to
	the users of the resource.

    o   the decisions as to the level of utilisation of the central
	resource are made by bean counters, who usually don't have
	to suffer from their decisions.  The bean counter mentality
	indicates that the resource must be utilised to and beyond
	the limit, to the point where the resource becomes useless.
	While you're at it, why not ``share'' your telephone with
	six (or ten, or twenty -- wait, it's not at 100 percent
        utilisation yet -- let's say forty) other people?  And let's
        get even more absurd -- let's ``share'' your desk with three
        others -- after all, you're not using it 100 percent, are you?

    o   group behavior gets very strange when factions arise as to
	who should have access to the biggest slice of the common
	resource pie.  You see all kinds of interesting psychology,
	with factions being rewarded for inefficient use of common
	resources.

    o   planning, scheduling, and estimating go out the window.
	When system or network response time varies from two seconds
	to twenty minutes, what kind of rational planning can you
	do?

For an extremely good commentary on the behaviour of groups of
people competing for common resources, go see ``The Gods Must Be
Crazy'' sometime.  Like the chief in the story, the best solution
to the problem is to throw the offending object off the edge of
the world.

One would think that the people in the industry had learned their
lessons in the so called ``software crises'' of the 60's and 70's
and would not want to repeat the nonsense.

	........  Henry
Organization: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA