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specialized machines
Received: from JOHN.LAAC-AI.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM by ALAN.LAAC-AI.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM via CHAOS with CHAOS-MAIL id 25189; Sun 11-Jun-89 18:17:18 PDT
Date: Sun, 11 Jun 89 18:16 PDT
From: Eric Buckman <BUCKMAN@ALAN.LAAC-AI.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM>
Subject: specialized machines
To: slug@ALAN.LAAC-AI.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM
In-Reply-To: Your message of 11 Jun 89 08:11 PDT
Message-ID: <19890612011655.7.BUCKMAN@JOHN.LAAC-AI.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM>
Date: Sun, 11-Jun-89 08:11:44-PDT
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Message-Id: <8906111210.AA24584@mbunix.mitre.org>
Posted-From: The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA
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To: slug@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM
Subject: specialized machines
Date: Sun, 11 Jun 89 08:10:38 EDT
From: bds@mbunix.mitre.org
[ Of all the comments that I made ...]
So I prefer the Symbolics machine for my work. However, recently a
decision was made to develop our system as a multi-user one, and to
use a separate database machine in the network. The dbms chosen was
Oracle (much of the Air Force is going in this direction), and since
Oracle won't run on a Symbolics, we chose the Sun 4 as the platform.
Since we didn't want to get into writing lots of low level network
code, we really had no choice but to use Oracle's built-in multi-user
code and therefore run the Lisp code on other Suns (with Lucid 3.0).
And so, one day we woke up with the realization that the future of the
project was no longer with Symbolics, but instead with Sun. The fact
that Symbolics machines are not capable of running a relational dbms
like Oracle killed it.
Ever hear of Statice, Symbolics object oriented DATABASE system, designed to
handle multiuser access to databases. My guess is it would have solved you Database problems
in a much more powerfull manner.
[Thankfully there are more projects, and nothing can touch a Symbolics
for bringing up the initial, single-user, standalone system. ....]
Barry Smith
Eric Buckman