From: Bakul Shah via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
To: Diomidis Spinellis <dds@aueb.gr>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Perkin-Elmer Sort/Merge II vs Unix sort(1)
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2025 11:10:15 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <67F7FAEB-551F-47AA-9E09-2D8948E4CCCF@iitbombay.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <28a16508-9ee5-41f1-af02-2f8cd7371de8@aueb.gr>
On Jan 17, 2025, at 9:23 AM, Diomidis Spinellis <dds@aueb.gr> wrote:
>
> I also think that the design of Perkin-Elmer's Sort/Merge II shows the influence of salespeople forcing developers to tack-on whatever features were required by important customers. Maybe the clean design of Unix owes a lot to AT&T's operation under the 1956 consent decree that prevented it from entering the computer market. This may have shielded the system's design from unhealthy market pressures during its critical gestation years.
IIRC sort/merge was/is a pretty major thing on IBM mainframes, with
products from multiple companies. May be Perkin-Elmer were trying
to compete with mainframe sort/merge products? Also, I suspect that
for sorting terabytes of data Unix sort likely won't work as fast as
mainframe sorts....
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2025-01-17 19:10 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2025-01-17 17:23 [TUHS] " Diomidis Spinellis
2025-01-17 19:10 ` Bakul Shah via TUHS [this message]
2025-01-17 19:35 ` [TUHS] " Marc Rochkind
2025-01-18 14:51 ` Diomidis Spinellis
2025-01-18 15:16 ` Larry McVoy
2025-01-18 15:40 ` Paul Winalski
2025-01-18 16:54 ` Marc Rochkind
2025-01-19 3:45 ` sjenkin
2025-01-18 16:00 ` Bakul Shah via TUHS
2025-01-18 16:25 ` Tom Lyon
2025-01-18 17:07 ` ron minnich
2025-01-18 19:39 ` Marc Rochkind
2025-01-17 20:07 ` John Levine
2025-01-18 4:46 ` Dave Horsfall
2025-01-17 18:12 Douglas McIlroy
2025-01-18 4:29 ` G. Branden Robinson
2025-01-21 21:53 Douglas McIlroy
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