[KLUG Advocacy] Linux tutor.

[Adam Williams]

> software itself was often free. In 2 instances, I got many hundreds of 80
> column punched cards.

Only used punch cards once, to load data into a machine.  I don't regret
not having done it twice.

> 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.

Right, I got some stuff my calling various companies BBSs through
references in magazines like Byte.  Wasn't very efficient, especially at
2400bps it took a VERY long time to find anything.

> >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.

And the odds of finding those magazines on a magazine rack in GR? - 0 - 

And I saw the trend of magazines like Byte and other periodicals I did
have move away from "real" technological problem-solving meat towards
review-mania.  With the decline of reader submitted material and
articles I more-or-less abandoned the whole magazine realm of things. 
Until periodicals like C++ User's Journal, Dobbs, and Sys-Admin somehow
found me through their marketing arms, otherwise I had no idea such
things even existed.

> 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 was 9 when the seventies ended - all I remeber is Star Wars, snow
days,  Carter interrupting my TV shows, and the cute girl down the
street.  I got my first computer in 1982.  As bad as it was in 87/88
when dial-up became possible I can only imagine what the 70's were like.

> 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.

Yep, I do very little coding now - at least beyond scripting.  Even the
modern RDBMS (PostgreSQL, Informix, etc...) itself obseletes many of
those older packages and tasks.  An OUTER join is a beautiful thing,
otherwise even something like that required either writing code (if you
were on a PC) or access to a "real" spreadsheet application (Wingz).

> >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.

Maybe they were, but I looked for a couple of days, called people, and
never found them.  I remember finding some things but they needed a
specific compiler or some such to get them to work.

> >"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.

Possibly.  But there was also the whole scale issue.  PC tools, even if
they worked on a file with 8,000 records typically bombed out when you
gave them 80,000 records.  UNIX also eliminated the need to peice-meal
everything,  but that may have had to do in part with the hardware
involved.

I think M$ has learned that lesson well.

> >>>..- 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.

I love result oriented people.

> 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.

I had the advantage that no one had even a hint of understanding what I
was doing or how I went about it - just that (what then was) really cool
stuff came out on the band printer.

> >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.

Probably because using imake drove him to slice-n-dice his family.

> 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!

None here either.

> >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

This is true, the cross-refernceing was basically non-existant.  I had
the advantage of having the time to just read through all ~18 volumes,
so I could find my way around pretty good.  Actually I'm not certain
documentation has gotten that much better as far as indexing goes.

> 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...

Those are still in there.  Or the famous error code -25880 error code
among informix users - "An unspecified error condition occurred" :)

> >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.
> ...

I tried capturing symbol tables, etc... on Windows once.  Once.  Just
re-install the *#$&(*!@ *()$&@( @*@ thing.

> >>... 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...

Supposedly they are going to begin to move away from drive letters in
2003 and later.  Sort of.  Now I see things like \\HOST\C$\... instead
of C:\...  Wow, yea, thats better.

> Good software engineering starts at /home...

Yep.

> >>>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.

True, we got a steal on that RS/6000.  Before that there was a DEC
16-way Z-80 based mini - for about $150,000.  But management always,
intuitively, understood the value of "real-time" processing.  Something
a collection of PCs (or originally Eagle II CP/M machines) just couldn't
provide.  When user A moved part 123 onto a document, and user B checked
availability four minutes later, they saw that everything in-stock had
been sold.  Sounds really trivial by todays standard, but to management
it meant never calling back and saying "Oh, hey, we actually don't have
any of those." (And places like GM & Steelcase actually keep track of
how many times their suppliers do that to them).

> >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...

True.  But if you have 10 - 15 users, your projects are probably also
MUCH less abitious.

> >$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.

Yep.  How many companies smaller than 32 users even have technology
staff?  I think everything pretty much assumes 100+ employees, or even
today, system and software providers really aren't interesting in
talking.  We have ~500 employees and some places aren't interesting in
talking to us.

> 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.

I think the break even point may be much much lower.  At say the cost of
12 PCs ($650 x 12 = $7,800).  So you could drop $5,500 on a server and
still have $150 per desk for some type of thin device.

> >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?

It would certainly take more time to setup and upgrade.  And assuming
all the software packages would play nice together.  I do still have
problems on 2000/XP where software A has a hard time coexisting with
software B - a problem I've never encountered on Linux/UNIX.

> >...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, 

I don't even want to imagine what one would get if one tried to
out-source PC support.  That way lies scary carnival death.

> and do similar with the bigger hardware...

Right, we cover the heavy iron (RS/6000, bigger xSeries) with support
and for things like Netfinity 4000s, etc... it really is cheaper just to
keep a spare in the basement.

> >>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.

Nice, I hated bank switching.  I still get the twitches when I think
about it.

> >>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.

What are you going to do when the last 486 dies? :)