Unix-haters

[gore]

This may or may not have been brought up on here before, but I wanted to take another look at it. This was done between 1991 and '92. A lot has changed since then and I'm just wondering if we can get a discussion going on how much of this actually matters anymore and if any of it is still true at least a little bit.


http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/uhh-cover.gif


This is the book's cover. Yes that's a Microsoft addy.



http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters.html

This is the main page where you can download the book in a PDF.



And here you have the preface:

http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/preface.html

Not super long but quite a read.

This is not me running in to save another bunch of "Idiot's who just don't get it" so please do not assume I'm trying to stop someone from not liking Unix.

Personally I don't know what these dudes are smoking but for the last two years I've used Mainly BSD and Linux anda TINY bit of Solaris. And I can't find these problems.

Hell I useLinux mainly which is "inspired" from Sun's OS which is Unix, and none of these things seem to happen to me.

This OS os something I use daily all day long for just about all tasks. Seriously one of the things they brought up was how the editor Emacs would dissappear taking a days worth of work and,.... Seriously who here as EVER experienced that?

[the_JinX]

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.

Got to love that disclaimer

Great find gore !!

[rcgreen]

"I have a natural revulsion to any operating system that shows so little planning as to have named all of its commands after digestive noises (awk, grep, fsck, nroff)."

It is the source of this, and other famous quotes. If you have access to a good
printer, the pdf prints out to a real professional quality book.

[catch]

Personally I don't know what these dudes are smoking but for the last two years I've used Mainly BSD and Linux anda TINY bit of Solaris. And I can't find these problems.

The book is nearly 15 years old... it makes sense that the problems they discuss should largely be mitigated by now.

Hell I useLinux mainly which is "inspired" from Sun's OS which is Unix, and none of these things seem to happen to me.

Inspired by SunOS? How do you figure... from what I recall and can tell it is just a bad port of Minix.

This OS os something I use daily all day long for just about all tasks. Seriously one of the things they brought up was how the editor Emacs would dissappear taking a days worth of work and,.... Seriously who here as EVER experienced that?

Well... emacs has long been considered one of the most bloated and least stable of applications, but don't forget all of this was over ten years ago.

Take care to judge things in their context. :-P

cheers,

catch

[alleyCat]

Originally posted here by catch
Inspired by SunOS? How do you figure... from what I recall and can tell it is just a bad port of Minix.

...I think Minix was created to be the 'Educational' version of SunOS... ?



This will make for an interesting read from what I can see of the language in the preface. I feel it reads like some disgruntled unix admin wrote it.

[rcgreen]

Don't let the name fool you. This is a unix lover's book.
Something along the lines of:

"Unix is the absolutely worst operating system.....
.....except for all the others, which are even worse!"

[catch]

I think Minix was created to be the 'Educational' version of SunOS

Nope... Minix is its own thing, designed to be a practical example to Tanenbaum's book "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation"

Oh and Minix 3 is now out and is the first version of Minix intended as a real world usable system and not just a teaching tool. My initial review of a live CD install is promising... immature and unefined, but promising.

Everyone interested in OS Theory should read this: http://www.minix3.org/doc/herder_thesis.pdf as well.

cheers,

catch

[gore]

Originally posted here by catch
[B]The book is nearly 15 years old... it makes sense that the problems they discuss should largely be mitigated by now.

I said I would like to know if any of this was relevent

Inspired by SunOS? How do you figure... from what I recall and can tell it is just a bad port of Minix.

Common misconception. Linus Torvalds said his inspiration was SunOS because he wanted something like he had at his uni Minix was what he used and he said it didn't suit him so he made one of his own.

Well... emacs has long been considered one of the most bloated and least stable of applications, but don't forget all of this was over ten years ago.

I don't think I've ever seen it crash.