[TUHS] Re: Perkin-Elmer Sort/Merge II vs Unix sort(1)

Related to the sort discussion, there's an oral history of Duane Whitlow, founder of SyncSort, which was a big deal in IBM shops in the 70s. (and perhaps later; I lost track) https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2013/05/102702251… On Sat, Jan 18, 2025 at 8:00 AM Bakul Shah via TUHS &lt;tuhs(a)tuhs.org&gt; wrote: > On Jan 18, 2025, at 7:16 AM, Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.com&gt; wrote: > > > > On Sat, Jan 18, 2025 at 04:51:15PM +0200, Diomidis Spinellis wrote: > >> I'm sure the mainframe sort programs did some pretty amazing things and > >> could run circles around the puny 830 line Unix Seventh Edition sort > >> program. The 215 page IBM DOS VS sort documentation that John Levine > posted > >> here is particularly impressive. But I can't stop thinking that, in > common > >> with the mainframes these programs were running on, they represent a > mindset > >> that has been surpassed by superior ideas. > > > > I disagree. Go back and read the reply where someone was talking about > > sorting datasets that spanned multiple tapes, each of which was much > > larger than local disk. sort(1) can't begin to think about handling > > something like that. > > > > I have a lot of respect for how Unix does things, if the problem fits > > then the Unix answer is more simple, more flexible, it's better. If > > the problem doesn't fit, the Unix answer is awful. > > > > cmd < data | cmd2 | cmd3 > > > > is a LOT of data copying. A custom answer that did all of that in > > one address space is a lot more efficient but also a lot more special > > purpose. Unix wins on flexibility and simplicity, special purpose > > wins on performance. > > Mainframes had usage based pricing, not unlike what you pay for renting > resources in the cloud, so performance really mattered. Also note that > users use whatever computing resources they have available to get their > job done, ideally at the lowest cost. Elegance of any OS architecture > is secondary, if that. > >