Re: gc-by-area and host uptimes

["Robert S. Kirk" <rsk%samson.cadr.dialnet.symbolics.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

Snail Mail Address: American Microsystems Inc. (A wholly owned
		    subsidiary of Gould Inc.) CAD Research Lab. P.O.
		    Box 967 Twain Harte, CA  95383
Phone Number:       (209)586-7422

    Date: Mon, 13 Feb 89 19:43:34 CST
    From: forbus@p.cs.uiuc.edu (Kenneth Forbus)
	    I don't necessarily beleive that Symbolics (or any company for
	    that matter) always has the insight to work on only the things with
	    the widest impact.	Sometimes companies misjudge the relative
	    impact of different alternatives and sometimes they just plain ignore
	    the impact issues and work on things
	    based upon their whims. Now some things that Symbolics is working on
	    clearly do have far greater impact than mark-sweep-gc. Like lower-cost
	    higher-performance hardware like Ivory. On the other hand, there have
	    been some significant development efforts by Symbolics, ones which
	    I assume take more effort than mark-sweep-gc, which I think have far
	    less impact than it. For example: the Fortran and Pascal compilers,
	    Joshua, Concordia, the document examiner, Statice, most of the
	    features of dynamic windows besides infinite scrolling, ...

    I agree with Jeff 100%.  If the XL-400 had come out at the same time
    as the Explorer-II, Symbolics would be in alot better shape now.  And
    given the increases in speeds of generic unix boxes, who will need an
    Ivory coprocessor?

    I'm not Symbolics, but if I were, I would be pouring heavy effort into
    convincing Sun or IBM to pay for porting the Symbolics environment to
    their workstations.

Here! Here!

As neat as the Ivory is, if I count my Lisp MIPs right, chips like the
Motorola 88000 and Intel 486 are faster than Ivory and surely much less
expensive and more widely supported (or will be soon at least).

I say, let the other buggers make the hardware and let Symbolics
concentrate on Great software.