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

[ron minnich]

I checked and syncsort is still  out there, doing their thing. Fifty years
of sorting! Sort of amazing.

On Sat, Jan 18, 2025 at 8:40 AM Tom Lyon <pugs78 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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/2013/05/102702251-05-01-acc.pdf
>
> On Sat, Jan 18, 2025 at 8:00 AM Bakul Shah via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>> On Jan 18, 2025, at 7:16 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> 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.
>>
>>
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