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

[Marc Rochkind]

Why did you say "thoughtless agglomeration of features?"

Do you know anything about the design of the P-E S/M, or is just a biased
guess? Have you ever tried a large external sort with UNIX commands?

Marc

On Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 12:10 PM Bakul Shah via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> On Jan 17, 2025, at 9:23 AM, Diomidis Spinellis <dds at aueb.gr> wrote:
> >
> > I also think that the design of Perkin-Elmer's Sort/Merge II shows the
> influence of salespeople forcing developers to tack-on whatever features
> were required by important customers.  Maybe the clean design of Unix owes
> a lot to AT&T's operation under the 1956 consent decree that prevented it
> from entering the computer market.  This may have shielded the system's
> design from unhealthy market pressures during its critical gestation years.
>
> IIRC sort/merge was/is a pretty major thing on IBM mainframes, with
> products from multiple companies. May be Perkin-Elmer were trying
> to compete with mainframe sort/merge products? Also, I suspect that
> for sorting terabytes of data Unix sort likely won't work as fast as
> mainframe sorts....
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