From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <463D9B63.7060606@conducive.org> Date: Sun, 6 May 2007 17:09:55 +0800 From: W B Hacker User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070221 SeaMonkey/1.1.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] speaking of kenc References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5d21e0e8-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 lucio@proxima.alt.za wrote: >> well it can be done. but to abstract all hardware, not possible. it >> will be very complicated and dog slow. > > That's relative. Vista is dog-slow, if what I hear is anything to go > by. Does that put anyone off? > > I ought to point you to XYwrite II, the first "word processor" I used > on the PC. I should dig out my copy and try it. Or Vedit or PeachCalc (x80 Visicalc clone). RBase for DOS is another one. Pretty much lives entirely in the L1 cache of a modern Core-D. Work that took 15 miutes on a 386-20 is too fast to bother measuring. In the OTHER direction, Netscape for OS/2 used to open in 2 seconds from cold SCSI cache, 2/10's of a second from warm on a K6-500, ASUS DA-2100, 20 MB/s SCSI drives. Now SeaMonkey takes over twice that on Core-D 2.8 GHz, 2G DDR2, SATA 3. And OpenOffice? Begone! > I think you need to run it on a 4.7 MHz processor to > appreciate how fast it was, on modern hardware it would be hard to > realise that there is plenty untapped performance behind the scenes. > See 'Menuet' for a quick desktop. Written in asm, BTW. "never say die..." > Speed is there to be consumed, the fashion is to (ab)use it for > eye-candy and multimedia. Thing is, the decision makers are those > with the full wallet and they can manipulate the market. The loser is > the innovation that is the daughter of necessity. But that is another > subject altogether. > > ++L > > Ack - we should probably all hit the showers now. Been enlightening to get some of these viewpoints aired. I'm glad to find that not ALL 9Fans are Luddites, anyway... (ducks and waddles off, pun 'inlined'...) Bill