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

[Diomidis Spinellis]

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/cmd/sort.c#L350

Diomidis

On 17-Jan-25 21:35, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> 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