Cliffy wrote:
> Bruce chants:
> >Okay. A system is ready for the big time when its users forget that
> >"fiddle" applies to anything other than musical instruments and
> >bookkeeping records.
>
> If that's the definition of "big time" then count me out.  As soon as
> OSes come right and ready out of the box, you and I better start
> making our own hamburgers, because any fool off the street will be
> able to administer a system.

Well, that attitude is part of the problem.  Perhaps a fool off the
street can administer a ready-rolled OS, but the solutions they find to
problems "add disk, add memory, upgrade the CPU, add another CPU" are
equally foolish (many times).  MPE is much easier to administer, and you
don't necessarily have to poke or regen the kernel to tweak it.

> I have a hunch that, no matter which end of an airplane he sits in,
> Mr. Gates probably wrote very little of the NT source code himself.

I would agree with you there, as would many other old-timers who have
been overwhelmed by advances in IT these days.  But I would also argue
that when Bill was writing code, he didn't need multi-megabytes to get
the job done.  When you get tired of manning the oars, you graduate to
steering the ship.  (Not that I'm so sure he's on course, but that
wasn't the point I was trying to make).

> As far as the "NT 1997=MPE 1979" comment goes, I also realize that any
> denouncement of MPE in here is akin to screaming obscenities in
> church, but, lets face it... MPE not only represents a software
> investment, but also a hardware investment.

I'd agree on the entry level price, but we have the 918DX and similar
threads attacking that issue.  MPE is overpriced on the justification
that the user base is small, but the *REAL* question here is to take
the cost and compare to the funding of R&D, support, etc of MPE when
it was the flagship versus funding now.  If you have a hundred engineers
on a project for a countable-range thousands of users, you have to set
a high price to regroup your investment.  When you drop that to a few
dozen [perhaps] engineers, the picture changes considerably.

> PS - If *anyone* thinks that MPE was as robust in '79 as NT is now,
> they should *not* admit it.

Where was NT in '79?  And where was MPE in '79?

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>