Re: workstation speed

[Kenneth Forbus <forbus@p.cs.uiuc.edu>]

	Gee, isn't it nice that you're comparing their latest stuff with
	our ancient history.  7.1 has a lot of speedups.  (But thanks for
	the other nice things you said).
	
I've heard that, and am looking forward to that part of it.  However, I'm
told on 3650's it may give something like 30%, which is a far cry from 2.8x.
I haven't heard any solid bits on how much faster it is on 3670's and 3640's,
which is what we mostly have.  Is it signficantly faster on them as well?

	The Rel 7 user-interface tools will take you places that will make your
	shiny new "Explorer" II look like a strictly paved-street machine.  We

I don't have one yet, sorry to say.  My comment wasn't about power of tools,
but their performance.  The TI window system looks pretty much like the old
MIT system, but by gosh they moved!  Switching between processes was very
fast, and menus responded instantly.  Sort of like switching from 4MB to
16MB on a Symbolics, except I've never seen a Symbolics move like this.

>give you mud tires and a powerful user-interface engine.  There's lots
>of leverage in the gearbox to get your applications up the hill quickly,
>without getting bogged down in the swamps of writing mouse-sensitivity
>code, layouts, etc.
	
Yes, everything I've seen indicates that 7.1 makes it easier to hack
graphics.  But to me that is secondary.  In fact, if these powerful
features make every interaction with the machine slower, to me they are
not features.  As I understand it, and your message later confirms,
these things can be turned off.  I applaud providing this flexibility.

	And don't forget, it comes with an 8-times larger cargo area.
	
Address space? Now if Symbolics RAM were reasonably priced, one could get
128MB of RAM and use a whole Eagle for swap space...

>I think you'll find the 7.1 features to be well worth any minor slowdowns.
>I find it a lot faster to actually USE, and tens of times faster to write
>any user-interface.
	
It took many, many months to negotiate a reasonable price, but I'm
told in a few weeks it will be here.  I'm looking forward to it,
despite the conversion effort.  The jump from Rel 5 to Rel 6 was a
real pleasure.  I hope this change will be the same.