From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 1995 17:50:40 -0400
From: Bill Jackson bj@impact.xerox.com
Subject: Set User (aka su)
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 1ad476e2-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19950822215040.kKaIDwOrt-c0Kcre9u6cGbgZo3Xjf3nUBdtVnGs01Ig@z>


|> From: forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk
|> 
|> (after all, Sun's EEPROM has the screen mapped, and did you ever see
|> the display and scrolling time on that in the older Sparcs.  whew!)

I hate to find myself in the possible position of defending Sun
on this one, but I would like to point out that there were two very
significant reasons for this: (1) folks didn't expect that performance
would be an issue, and (2) the code involved was interpreted forth
running from EEPROM which require 1 usec/byte fetch.  It doesn't
take long to figure out where all the time goes...

Of course, this little factoid has nothing to do with the current
conversation.  My preference would also be to cast out support
for 'terminals', but I'll concede that it's a bit naive.  Also,
while I find plan9's user interfaces inhibiting at best, this seems
like fertile ground for folks who might be interested in exploring
new approaches.

-bj