[KLUG Advocacy] Linux tutor.

[Robert G. Brown]

On Sat, 04 Oct 2003 07:52:18 -0400, Adam Williams <adam@morrison-ind.com> wrote:
>Yep, writing C code to transform numbers based on "regular expressions" 
>(didn't know that I was re-inventing at the time), and do other sort of
>those things is really NON-OPTIMAL.
Yes, even back then. One trend I have noted increasingly over time is that 
it pays to search for software rather than dive in and code, which was fairly
commmon when I got into this dodge. In the early 70's, there was no way to
look, nothing to look for, no medium in which to look, and no way to fetch
what might have been found.

I DID manage to find some software, even in that environment. I needed some
software for astronomy and particle counts. How did I get it? I read papers
in journals, and the authors would say things like "The software used to 
reduce the data in this paper is available from the author". I'd contact 
the author, more often by telephone or postal mail than e-mail, and they 
would send me the software on some physical media, which I'd have to pay
for. Some mainframe software required that I mail them a tape, even if the
software itself was often free. In 2 instances, I got many hundreds of 80
column punched cards.

There were exceptions to this, but it was the mid-80's before statement like
this became common: "The software is available via anonymous ftp from 
icarus.bigrandd.edu in directory /pub/particles". URLs and browsers were
still in the future.

>I didn't even know anything like APL existed...
Right, another example of poor communication. In reality, there were a LOT
of fairly high-level programming tools that would deal with many of the tasks
you needed to do, but unless you browsed a couple of DOZEN magazines (and they 
had to be the RIGHT magazines) there was very little chance of finding them.

I knew people who trolled for "better software" from the late 70's through
the time the world-wide web became pervasive, and it was tedious work.

I am belaboring these points because they are part of the economic tradeoff 
that drives choices like "Do we write the code here, or do we search for it?"
Overall, the economics used to be very much in favor of writing the code. Now,
the economics tend to favor spending at least some time searching for existing
software, instead of coding.

...

>When I found awk on AIX I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I was really
>surprised that there were no equivalent tools on the "PC":
I think awk and other "Unix tools" had been ported to the PC by the mid-1980's,
and was using them on PC's, in MS-DOS, before I hit real UNIX systems in 1988.

>"I mean WTF?  Doesn't anybody know about these?"  The
>answer was "Apparently not", so risking $10 on some funky OS that
>claimed to run on my PC *AND* provide those tools?  Easily worth the
>risk.
A no-brainer. Even so, with better communication, you might have known
about "UNIX tools on DOS" diskette I stumbled over, and you would have
not been quite so eager to jump from DOS/Windows...which ought to be a
lesson to Microsoft.

>>The other problem (at the time) was that lots of players were changing a lot
>>of the rules, often too quickly to really complete large projects....
>Yep, even Borland was mixing it up between every release of their
>software (and at $300 a whack).   Access looked way too much like dBase,
>and I didn't want to go there, I had enough tools that couldn't deliver
>as it was.
All sensible. 

>>>..- OR - WingZ, awk, postgres, on an RS/6000?
>>Um, you've got a better shot at things here, people didn't appreciate Wingz
>People didn't, I did.  It was "odd" about certian things, and they could
>have learned some UI lessons from the Excel folks,  but it could process
>data - which was sort of the point.  Excel could think and possibly day
>dream about processing data.
Wingz was indeed appreciated (and still is!) by folks who had content over 
structure and behavior. That was the environment (Wall St quants) that I was 
in. These guys would wade through anything to get the results they needed,
and if the form was nice, but content free. it ended up in the shredder, if
it was lucky.

>Never wrote any C code for WingZ,  I was happy it didn't puke every
>fifteen minutes.
Well, I wrote some C that changed THAT behavior! :) Early versions of
Wingz didn't protect itself very well, a stray pointer or two could wreak
all kinds of havoc. I was lucky the thing crashed as quickly as it did! :)
....
>....you could dial up via someone like Delphi and get into
>sunsite.unc.edu.  Gold Mine!  I didn't know anything about licensing,  I
>just knew I could get it and didn't care.
Much of that stuff didn't have much in the way of licences, and a great
majority was written by college and grad students who didn't have a clue
about the legal side-effects of licencing. The schools were pretyy clueless, 
too. The attitude seems to be that it was sorta neat that students were showing
people the results of their projects and tinkering, and if anyone could use it
that was swell, and someone might remember where they got it from and think a
bit better of them, later. I was in big-time corporate America, and we actually
had lawyers who cared about stuff like this.

>Although I did learn to loath Imake.
Yes, seemed to be the peak of UNIX obscurity at the time. No one liked it,
the only exception being a former SUN engineer who spoke in monosylables, never
made eye contact, and usually ate alone in his own corner of the cafeteria.

Imake was a somethg of a black art, and it was powerful magic. I see that it
has been called a "horror" on a parellel subthread. No argument there!

>True, but it wasn't all that bleak.
No, I wasn't trying to paint a bleak picture, and in many ways it was fun. I
would compare it to the Wild West. AS long as you didn't get shot, things could
be really great.

>Those thick white volumes from IBM documented everything (and I mean
>everything down to the parameters for the various system calls).  One 
>could at least take a stab at it.
That's certaily true. IBM's failure related to indexing, and tables of 
contents (the nature of the failure being that they didn't have any, or they
were too detailed). I also recall looking up things like error codes that
weren't in the manuals, and IBM people on the other end of the phone line
saying things like "Gee, you're right, it's not there!". But these were 
bearable. Management seemed to understand when I said things like "We're 
still researching the A292 error", since it was so time consuming...

>And on the PC... "This application has performed an illegal operation" 
>(i.e. "Tough cookies").
Right. you're nowhere. The software vendor wants this put into a debug 
environment and rerun... except there is so much workstation-specific stuff 
going on that creating debugger-capable environemnts that really duplicate
production is quite a challenge.
...

>>... In addition, you can make system image CDs completely legally... 
>And restore the system image to a different workstation, with different
>hardware - Linux cares how much?  You might have to reconfigure X and
>sound.  Windows XP?  Hah!
Right, with Windows, I often feel pretty much stuck...I'd like to be able to 
move packages from one drive to another, but it's not so easy, since the
Registry points to a specific drive, not an abstracted path...

Good software engineering starts at /home...

Bruce Smith <bruce@armintl.com> writes:
>How about "upgrades"?  Got a NT workstation you'd like to make into a NT
>server?  Guess what, you can't upgrade, it's reinstall time!  I suspect
>the same is true today with XP (switching from home to pro or whatever).

>Not to mention if you want to upgrade 9x to NT to 2K to XP to 2003 ...

Right this introduces a lot of doscontinuity; one is really forced to adopt
completely new system disciplines, even though the general impression is one
of upgrading through the product line.

Adam Willimans continues....
.....

>>>Back in the day AIX was $1,400,  a comparable Windows installation with
>>>theoretically equivalent tools was about the same. (Early nineties, I've
>>>actually done that math).
>>OK, but what was the difference in the cost of the requisite hardware?
>You got it there.  RS/6000 530 - $57,000.  Compaq Presario - $2,100.
And in the past, the cash outlay was less favorable for the RS/6000.

>But, about ~100 people were using that RS/6000 at the same time I was
>doing stuff that would bring the Presario to the ground.
Sure, but you need those ~100 people to justify it. If you have 10 or 15
users, it doesn't look so good...

>$57,000 / 101 = $564.36 per user.
>$2,100 / 1 = $2,100 per user.
>Aren't we talking about TCO?  Yeah, you'd have to add $350 per user for
>a terminal.  So the RS/6000 came out at $914.36.
Which is a break-even at 32 users.

We're also talking about something else, reliability and value. Will those
32 users get better service with AIX and the RS/6000 than with 32 Windows
machines? Will it cost less to administer? I think that in most cases the 
answer will be YES. This doesn't have a lot to do with AIX or UNIX per se,
but it does show the benefits of economy of scale, and where they kick in.
I think these numbers (and hence the breakeven point) is different today.

>Of course you did inherit some limitations - no excel, etc...  But at
>the time these really weren't considered earth shaking, if most of the
>people even knew what a spreadsheet was (cough, most still don't but
>think they do).

Bruce Smith continues:
>There were (are?) spreadsheets (and word-processors) that would run on a
>dumb terminal in a curses(-like?) interface.  We ran some for awhile,
>but once windowing environments started coming out, our users didn't
>want to have anything to do with them any longer.

Adam Willimans continues....
>>>Linux was $199 - $10 for the CDs, and $189
>>>for Word Perfect.  WingZ ran on either Linux or AIX, at no charge.  Now
>>>Open Office is free (and better than WP ever was, and oocalc can pretty
>>>much hold its own).  We only purchase one $89 per seat package
>>>(DbVisualizer).
>>Driving TCO through the floor. It's interesting to see what's happening to
>>these numbers in the Windows world. 
>Up, up, and away.
Yes, and this tends to make that environment less attractive, which will
reduce market share, and drive up prices, etc.

>>I'd like to ask the group a question, and see people chime in with their 
>>own experience on this... are contemporary Windows installs more stable,
>>less stable, or about as stable as their counterparts of 5 years ago?
>
>Oh, much much more so.  XP doesn't spontaneously crash, or at least I've
>never seen it.  ....

OK, thanks...Any other readers want to answer this question?

>>The reason I ask this is that it is the "other" large determining factor
>>in computing TCO (besides purchase/licence costs for software). My analysis
>>indicates that while there are other costs, they tend to even out.
>
>With twice the hardware and about $1,500 worth of software I could do my
>job on XP with no intense pain (other than actually needing to
>Edit->Cut, Edit->Past, all the time)....
Added labor cost? Also cost of added errors?

>...I really think the ongoing cost would be roughly
>the same, except for the annual upgrade fees.  But I don't use support,
>ever.  I have support contracts with IBM for hardware, and Informix for
>the RDBMS software, but nothing for PCs.  And I call on those contracts
>I have maybe once a year.
You are being unusually parsimonious with support, but you've matched what
you pay for with what you use, so that's good value. A lot of large organi-
zation self-support the PC stuff, and do similar with the bigger hardware...

>>If I don't get good response, I might even post this as a seperate message.
>And you might not get one even then.
I got one already, from you! :)

>>Yes, I recall (early 70's) people telling me that something WAS NOT WORTH 
>>DOING if it took up more than 32 K... yes, that's K with a "K", not M. I
>>wroe a lot of stuff in 28 K work areas, and felt that the light of day and
>>the blessings of the diety [ies] shone upon me when I could use 128 K to 
>>do similar stuff.
>Was that 128k without bank switching?  Hallelujah is right.
No bank switching...this was on a MAINFAME.

>>The last time I heard stories about doing plenty with no memory were as the 
>>USSR opened up, but before Western technology really got in there....
>Someone should go back to manufacturing the Commodore PET, just for
>training purposes.  Talk about agony.  OK, maybe we'll give then a
>KayPro II.
Absolutely. There are beneift to learning how to code on deficient platforms;
we sometimes think the 486's are to fast for this, but the guys who come out
of that program are writing NOTICEABLY faster code than others on contempor-
ary systems.
							Regards,
							---> RGB <---