[not about] gc-by-area and host uptimes

["P. T. Withington" <PTW%jasper.scrc.symbolics.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

[Like Reti, I here express my personal opinion.]

At least you admit to still using our machines; so we haven't gone
completely off the deep end.

I believe Genera could *run* on a commodity hardware with acceptable
performance; but could it have been *developed* on a commodity hardware
in the time it was?  At the time the development of Genera (and even
Ivory) were started, I don't believe the MIPs ratios were nearly as
impressive as they are today, and performance on commodity hardwares was
seen as a roadblock to many of the software ideas envisioned.  (Its not
clear that the MIPs advantage is going to continue either.  My crystal
ball is always cloudy.)

Aside from raw MIPs, every RISC chip I know of adopts at least *some* of
the ideas present in Symbolics hardware (albiet in a limited fashion).
I expect someday the commodity chip manufacturers will have adopted
enough of the ideas to make the porting of Genera quite plausible.

Until that time, stopping to port Genera to a commodity hardware
just drains scarce resources that could be better used to advance
Genera.

We have to exploit all avenues to stay ahead of our competition.  Our
custom hardware (still, to my mind) gives us an additional edge (and
thereby gives our customers an additional edge over their competition).
I don't believe (but certainly can't prove) that if we took all the
money we spent on hardware and spent it instead on software we would be
as far ahead as we are.

You must realize that we constantly re-evaluate this tradeoff ourselves
and that the issue is far from black-and-white.