SOME DISAGREEABLE FACTS

As with many other operating systems, the system we actually constructed disappointed us in several ways. In particular, it was large, slow and difficult to use. This chapter surveys most of our disappointments. It must be kept in mind that this is a description of the results of the first implementation of the system. Other systems, notably Multics, have had many rewrites which greatly improved their performance. We feel the same could be expected for CAL TSS, and in the next chapter some immediate improvements will be suggested. A major problem for this description is the lack of detailed measurements of system overhead, either in memory space or CPU time. This is due to the very strong pressure we felt towards producing a working system. We assumed that once we had a system up and working, we could then analyze the system, look for trouble spots and clean them up. We never reached that stage of development.