The UNIX Haters Handbook 1

I found this gem while doing some unrelated research. It ought to spice up the endless "My OS is better" debates.

http://www.simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

Our grievance is not just against Unix itself, but against the cult of Unix zealots who defend and nurture it. They take the heat, disease, and pestilence as givens, and, as ancient shamans did, display their wounds, some self-inflicted, as proof of their power and wizardry. We aim, through bluntness and humor, to show them that they pray to a tin god, and that science, not religion, is the path to useful and friendly technology.

Computer science would have progressed much further and faster if all of the time and effort that has been spent maintaining and nurturing Unix had been spent on a sounder operating system. We hope that one day Unix will be relinquished to the history books and museums of computer science as an interesting, albeit costly, footnote.

[purple]Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day

 

[dilettante]

I wonder what that guy's preference is? Or is this just a general reaction he has to one brand of OS zealotry?

 

[MasterRacker]

Comments from one of the authors (who now works at Microsoft)

Due to being announced on Slashdot.org, the book has gotten a lot of fresh attention. I've added this page so that those downloading the book can be aware of some history before starting their read.

* This book is ten years old . I started work on it in 1992 (maybe even 1991) while I was a professor at Stanford. My co-editors took over after I started work at Microsoft. (So no, it's not a Microsoft conspiracy.) A lot has happened in the intervening decade.
* This book's target audience was people who themselves have noticed certain weaknesses in Unix at that time and could relate to our stories. Our goal was humor. Many readers have told us we succeeded in this. Even Eric Raymond liked it (his name is in the acknowledgements).
* The book is not meant to be balanced, it is a screed, pure and simple. Is it over the top? Yes.
* We wrote the contract with our publisher to have the copyright revert to us once the book went out of print. So yes, we have the right to publish it online. Feel free to mirror it where ever you want, print it out, and bind it.
* Do I have any regrets? Yes, that the funniest item in the book probably isn't anything we wrote, but is Dennis Ritchie's anti-forword. We had asked Dennis to write a forword, thinking that since he was doing Plan 9 at that time it would give him an opportunity to talk about how he had moved on from Unix and fixed its flaws in his next OS. (We were young and had a lot chutzpah then.) He read the Preface, and then sent back his essay. He told us he had worked hard to make it match the tone of its surroundings.
* If you enjoyed reading this book and felt it was worth the price of a least a movie and popcorn, send a $10 check to your favorite charity.

[purple]Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day

 

[MasterRacker]

Correction - he's not at MS any more. He's now doing research at the University of Washington.

[purple]Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day

 

[johnherman]

Oh, from a buggy OS provider to a soapbox at a University - big wow. The anti-unix zealot needs to recognize that the unix OS was built by a bunch of geniuses at AT&T' Bell Labs, once one of the biggest think tanks in America. These guys wanted to make something that worked and their jobs did not depend on making a profit for their shareholders. Hence, an OS which is efficient at using memory, has a small footprint in disk space, is written mostly in C language except for a few hundred lines of assembler, and has been adapted to almost every computer built since the 1970's.

Hey Mr. University former Microsoft guy - kiss my grits!
(and send $10 to Feed the Children for me - I ain't readin' your tome full of unsubstantiated opinion)

-------------------------
The trouble with doing something right the first time is that noboby appreciates how difficult it was.
- Steven Wright

 

[MasterRacker]

Did you bother to read a word of it? He quit working on the book when he went to MS and turned it over to some other guys who live, eat, sleep and breathe Unix.

From the Foreward (and about as non-Microsoft a person as you can find.)

What is this horrible fascination with Unix? The operating system of the 1960s, still gaining in popularity in the 1990s. A horrible system, except that all the other commercial offerings are even worse. The only operating system that is so bad that people spend literally millions of dollars trying to improve it. Make it graphical (now that’s an oxymoron, a graphical user interface for Unix).

You know the real trouble with Unix? The real trouble is that it became so popular. It wasn’t meant to be popular. It was meant for a few folks working away in their labs, using Digital Equipment Corporation’s old PDP-11 computer.
.

Unix was designed for the computing environment of then, not the machines of today. Unix survives only because everyone else has done so badly. There were many valuable things to be learned from Unix: how come nobody learned them and then did better? Started from scratch and produced a really superior, modern, graphical operating system? Oh yeah, and did the other thing that made Unix so very successful: give it away to all the universities of the world.
.

Donald A. Norman
Apple Fellow
Apple Computer, Inc.

And while I’m at it:
Professor of Cognitive Science, Emeritus
University of California, San Diego

[purple]Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day

 

[johnherman]

Quote:

except that all the other commercial offerings are even worse

'Nuf said.

-------------------------
The trouble with doing something right the first time is that noboby appreciates how difficult it was.
- Steven Wright

 

[BocaBurger]

Make it graphical (now that’s an oxymoron, a graphical user interface for Unix).

Oh? Anyone use a Mac recently?

how come nobody learned them and then did better?

Anyone ever use an Amiga?

Marketing and legal departments seem to be the reason we use what we do today.



BocaBurger
<===========================||////////////////|0
The pen is mightier than the sword, but the sword hurts more!

 

[MasterRacker]

Yeah, from what I've heard, the Amiga is what should have been. I never had the chance to work with one, I got the chance to briefly see one and that's it. 32 bit true multi-tasking back in the "dark-ages".

I don't remember the history of NextStep - whether that was made from the ground up or layered on Unix. Windows sucks for many reasons. *nix sucks for many different reasons. Unix continues not because it's good, only because something better hasn't come along yet (except for Amiga maybe)

[purple]Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day

 

[dilettante]

I had an Amiga 1000 and later an Amiga 2000.

While there was some greatness there it suffered from a number of ills. The really nice video (for its time) was bound to television standards, which became a clear liability once cheap multisync monitors were common. A lot of weird design tradeoffs had been made because the thing was originally going to be more of a game console platform. The OS had some great features, but again it didn't really cut it because it was designed for floppies and small RAM configurations.

Of course many of those things could be overcome without losing much of its essential greatness. Some actually were improved later on... but by then it was really too late for Amiga.

They just didn't have the resources to compete in the arms race that accelerated around 1990. CPUs, RAM, hard drives, better video processors, and fast networks took off faster than Commodore-Amiga (and others) could deal with them. Competition was cut-throat in those days at the platform level. Consumers were faced with an endless barrage of press trying to convince them that PCs and Macs were the only "serious" computers worth investing in. Upgrade parts for PCs were starting to get dirt-cheap by 1994, making them look much more expandable than anything else and thus able to handle ever more bloated (feature rich) applications.

Commodity computing won out.

 

[bytehd]

he had moved on from Unix and fixed its flaws in his next OS."

Many of Unixes flaws were fixed:

http://www.novell.com/netware

George Walkey
Senior Geek in charge

http://www.insyncva.com

 

[BocaBurger]

I wonder who has the rights to Amiga code. Can you imagine that effciency, etc. updated to run on a G5 power processor with a gig of RAM?



BocaBurger
<===========================||////////////////|0
The pen is mightier than the sword, but the sword hurts more!

 

[bytehd]

I admit my old Amiga was cool in 1985.
perhaps that minimalist coding era is an answer
to Clippy and SmartTags and Biztalk...

George Walkey
Senior Geek in charge

http://www.insyncva.com

 

[MasterRacker]

BeOS. Saw a reference in another thread that reminded me of this one. Never had a chance to play with it but read a lot of good things.

[purple]Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day

 

[strongm]

>I had an Amiga 1000

I still have my Amiga 1000 ...

 

[alexhu]

british nuclear subs should be run using Windows.

I think this is a myth and has been misquoted many times - do you have a source ?

Alex (UK - ex-forces )

 

[jakeyg]

I did a bit of Unix at uni but havn't touched it since so I bought a book to give me a bit of an overview. On page 1 it said that you they assumed you already had unix installed on a pc somewhere because setting one up from scratch was a nightmare (slight paraphrase)

it didn't fill me with confidence. if it's that difficult to do are the rewards worth the effort involved? Same with linux, I know people who've installed it and are still trying to get bits of their computer to work with it.

 

[BocaBurger]

If you need Linux for the computer challenged, take a look at Linspire.com They even have a bootable CD so you can run Linux without installing. I set this up for several people and a full install on a new PC is less than half the time it takes to install XP on the same machine, and I didn't have to reboot so many times ;-)

BocaBurger
<===========================||////////////////|0
The pen is mightier than the sword, but the sword hurts more!

 

[MasterRacker]

The perfect OS would be built using the Unix command line layered on top of the Windows ME core and would use INTERCAL as it's scripting language.

[purple]Jeff
It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day

 

[CapsuleCorpJX]

Unix is stable. But the retarded interface makes me want to gag. None of the command lines names are intuitive, they all have to be memorized. The options are even worse, one letter preceded by a dash who's functions are not consistent across different commands.

Its kind of like the English language.
-r usually means recursive, but not always...
And oh yea, instead of a command called "password" we use "passwd" to show our l33tness.