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

I gave specific examples of facilities offered by the Perkin-Elmer Sort/Merge, (file allocation, blocking, interactive and batch modes) that on Unix systems are handled in a way that allows all programs to benefit from them. The Unix way reduces duplication and makes the system more versatile by offering the facilities to all programs. I based my comparison on the documented facilities of the two programs. I also have some first hand experience with Perkin-Elmer's OS/32. In the 1990s I was involved in servicing and transferring some record-keeping applications from a Perkin-Elmer running OS/32 and RELIANCE to a Unix system running Ingres. I found I was a lot more productive in Unix's shell than in Perkin-Elmer's MTM. (Admittedly, this could also be a matter of experience.) In 2018 I used the Unix sort and join commands to speed up a MariaDB relational join of a five billion row table with a 847 million row table (108 GB in total) from 380 hours to 12 hours [1], so I'm very happy with how Unix sort can handle moderately large data sets. The GNU version will even recursively merge intermediate files when it runs out of file descriptors. Even the Seventh Edition sort would overflow to temporary files and merge them [2]. 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. [1] https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20180805/ [2] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7/usr/src/cm… Diomidis On 17-Jan-25 21:35, Marc Rochkind wrote: