[Fwd: Re: Position & proposal]

[Paul Prescod]

> > Time-sharing was an advance; I have no doubt. I can remember watching
> > both of my parents submitting card decks while they were in college.
> > OTOH, the personal computer - the true workstation - was an equally
> > great advance over timesharing. It simply seems to me that everyone in
> > thier rush to bash M$ has decided to forget the wins in decentralized
> > PCs.
> > 
> > Mutlitasking is exquisite; sharing those tasks with someone else is no
> > longer necessary. Sometimes I think computer people lived so long in the
> > desert of scarce resources that they didn't recognise that they had left
> > it behind a long time ago.

I still live in the desert of scarce resources. I still want more processing
power, disk space, RAM and bandwidth than I have. So-called "NOSes" make it 
easy for me to get these. I rlogin to a machine that is faster, bigger or
otherwise better and do the big job that I need done. Your Pentium seems
fast, but you are comparing it to the minicomputers of the yesterday, not
today. Try rendering Jurrasic park on it (or doing a Web-search on it) and 
you'll see that *arbitrarily* distributed computing is still the path to the 
promised land. I don't believe that LispOS should cede the Altavista's and
renderers of the world to Unix.

 Paul Prescod