From: thompson@pan.ssec.honeywell.com ((jt) John Thompson)
Subject: re: Favourite DOMAIN/OS features (or mis-features)
Organization: Electrotechnical Laboratory, Tsukuba Science City
Distribution: fj
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 22:28:56 GMT
Return-Path: <apollo-list-errors@srvr1.engin.umich.edu>



I figured someone else would have mentioned these already....

o   The keyboard.  Biilllioonnns and biillionnns (sorry C. Sagan) of keys all
    waiting to be redefined.  I _hate_ having to point and click and pulldown
    and popup everything.

o   The USER-extensible, typed, file system!  Why just have devices with drivers?
    Have the whole bloody file system loaded with drivers for everything and
    anything.  Want to have people not screw around reading and writing directories?
    Fine;  just have the type-mangler restrict operations.  Want to have an
    object resolve to one of several places, to provide robustness?  Go ahead!
    Want to store large read-only objects in compressed format, and still read
    them?  Sounds good to me too.  (Thanks, guys -- I love the COMPRESS file type.)

o   Commands to query all machines in the network.  This sucks in a mixed net,
    but I _loved_ getting lists of all the machines that I needed to worry about.
    (bldt -a, netstat -a, ctnode, lcnode, lcnet, lvolfs -a, lusr -allnodes, ....)

o   Diskless booting.  In order to boot a Hockey-Puck diskless, I need to make a
    cluster machine (Warning - there is no easy way to uncluster a machine, and
    there are potential problems in loading software updates on a clustered machine.
    Do you want to continue?), find out what the LAN ID of the diskless machine is,
    and then boot.  I can't do this as a temporary "you're up and going again"
    solution to users' problems.

o   The token ring.  Gee...  why would anyone want a network interface that DIDN'T
    fall apart at high loads?  We hit about 5MB/sec with ~15 nodes talking during 
    the daily backups.  What will this do on an ethernet???   :-(
    "But Johnny, the ethernet is standard.  Don't say bad things about it."

o   Dynamic swap space.  You automatically got the remainder of the root volume,
    and innovative programmers could map files in to memory, and use remote
    systems for unlimited memory... virtually.   :-)

These have been mentioned before, but --

o   The networked file-system that lies UNDER the O/S, instead of on TOP of it.
o   PADS PADS PADS PADS PADS PADS PADS.  Why do we have to go to a graphical
    interface with over a million pixels, and use TERMINALS??!!??
o   The DM editor, available on-demand to all (cooked) input areas.



Sigh.  Maybe around OSF/4, we'll get back to the good-old-days and have
decent capabilities.  Of course, you'll need a workstation with 512MB RAM
running at a GigaSPEC, with 4GB of disk devoted to the O/S, and another 4GB
for swap space....


-- jt --
John Thompson
Design Services Engineer / Sys-Admin
Honeywell, SSEC
Plymouth, MN  55441
thompson@pan.ssec.honeywell.com

What do I know?  I'm just a Token Administrator.
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