Position & proposal

[William A. Barnett-Lewis]

Paul Prescod wrote:
> 
> > The basic assumptions behind creating Yet Another Lisp Machine are
> > two-fold:
> > 1)  that a networkable _personal_ computer provides greater productivity
> > than any form of timesharing -
> > whether it's called a Network Computer, Java, or mainframe and
> 
> I'm not sure what this assumption has to do with a Lisp Machine. Why shouldn't
> a good Lisp Machine support any of the above modes of operation depending
> on which is the most appropriate? Isn't Unix's scalability from
> personal user OS to shared mini-computer OS one of the things Unix did
> right that Microsoft consistently gets wrong? Is there a good reason to
> ignore one side of the single/multi-user spectrum?
> 
>  Paul Prescod

Perhaps it's simply philosophical, but I believe that any computer
resource is inherently cheaper than 1 second of a user/programmer's
time.
Hence 1 user = 1+ cpu and all resources. Once you begin timesharing, you
create artifical scarcity (artificial in the sense that it's
unnecessary)

William