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A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

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Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#21

Post by webreac »

lalalandland wrote: post #9

"Anyway, have you ever tried to use man? It's fine as long as you know what you are looking for. How would you ever find out the name of command given just the function you wanted to execute? You can't. " One of my gripes with UNIX systems is how opaque they are

I have learned unix with sunOs in 1990. Man pages were excellent. The first command I learned was "man man". There was a paper version of the man pages available in the computer room (among many other sun documentations). I became pissed by man pages only when I switched to linux. At that time, I have discovered the crypt(3) command by looking at the index of man pages. One week later, I had cracked 10% of passwords of the school (creating my own dictionary).

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#22

Post by somesortofsystm »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #16
lalalandland wrote: post #9

"Anyway, have you ever tried to use man? It's fine as long as you know what you are looking for. How would you ever find out the name of command given just the function you wanted to execute? You can't. " One of my gripes with UNIX systems is how opaque they are

apropos

man -k "key words of the thing i'm searching for"

^^ also works fine ..

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#23

Post by arethuza »

m463 wrote: post #4
rcarmo wrote: post #2

We had to use VAX/VMS when I was a freshman, decades ago. The “Computer Center” had dozens of VT220s hooked up to it via serial “hubs” in the main building basement (the very stereotype of a nerd dungeon). It wasn’t half bad. As multi-user systems went, it was actually quite good and we ran a number of projects on it before moving off to PCs, Sun Workstations and Linux in general. I remember all the staples of the er…

> largely (functionally) indistinguishable from a UNIX machine Although they were functionally similar, there were some practical considerations... I will say that path names in unix were a simple and elegant , compared to what VMS used. I recall VMS paths were something like [foo.bar.bletch]something.txt At the time this was a little cumbersome, but looking back it is much worse.

"[foo.bar.bletch]something.txt"

Why is that better though - isn't that just sheer familiarity?

NB It looks ugly to me as well but a lot of syntax looks ugly until you become familiar with it (C, PostScript, Lisp, Python all seemed pretty weird looking to me first time I used them and I came to really like all those languages over time).

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#24

Post by C1sc0cat »

lalalandland wrote: post #9

"Anyway, have you ever tried to use man? It's fine as long as you know what you are looking for. How would you ever find out the name of command given just the function you wanted to execute? You can't. " One of my gripes with UNIX systems is how opaque they are

DEC documentation was always very good but then it was a product you paid for.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#25

Post by Lammy »

lalalandland wrote: post #9

"Anyway, have you ever tried to use man? It's fine as long as you know what you are looking for. How would you ever find out the name of command given just the function you wanted to execute? You can't. " One of my gripes with UNIX systems is how opaque they are

Anecdote this jogged from my memory: my first Unix experience was NetBSD on a SEGA Dreamcast game console, of all things. This must have been some time in 2000 or 2001, but I remember sitting there trying every possible command I could think of trying to find one that did anything at all so i could keep going and learn more. The DOS commands I knew obviously didn’t do anything. Neither did anything like ‘help’ or ‘?’. After five minutes or so of trying commands off the top of my head I tried ‘exit’, and that was the end of my Unix experience until I mail ordered a Mandrake Linux CD-ROM set in 2002 :)

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#26

Post by CaptainZapp »

alxlaz wrote: post #14
thenoblesunfish wrote: post #7

The complaints here don't seem to be much about how Unix works in a deep way, but rather the particular language/syntax which is used to interact with it ("rm", etc.). While that's certainly annoying in many ways, so are almost all languages in common use. You could write a lot about how horrible English is (or German, as Mark Twain famously did). But English is a useful standard - politics, inertia, and the value of…

The back story to this is that the DIGITAL Command Language (more or less the equivalent of an Unix shell), with its excellent filesystem-level features and the environment around it (e.g. the well-written and extremely thorough documentation) was very much light-years ahead of anything you could get on most Unix environments at the time. Going back to the Unix shell felt a bit like a step back. FWIW, there are plent…

Ah yes!

Documentation for VMS and the whole shebang of layered products.

Until this day, in my book, the absolute gold standard when it comes to documentation.

Having the arguably best tools suite to develop (LSE, Debugger, what have you) also didn't hurt.

I still believe it the best operating system I ever worked with.

Ironically the article describes quite precisely why DEC failed.

Most of the company had a visceral hate of anything Unix and anybody involved with anything that even smelled faintly of Unix was a second class citizen.

Well, looking at Ultrix may have been the main reason for that. Ironically and decades later they had one of the best Unix offers on the market with Tru64 Unix.

DEC was in many, many respects an awesome company. Shame that Compaq (and later HP) never really had a clue about what they actually got there.

Source: I worked for DEC from 90 - 94.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#27

Post by cheph »

> Unix and C however form a powerful deterrent to the average astronomer to write her or his own code (and the average astronomer's C is much, much worse than his Fortran used to be).

Compared to what? If I want to quickly bang out some code and run it, installing fedora (or another distro) is probbably the least painful way to get it done.

I would say that Windows is a powerful deterrent to the average person writing their own code much more so than Linux.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#28

Post by pjmlp »

nix23 wrote: post #20
lalalandland wrote: post #9

"Anyway, have you ever tried to use man? It's fine as long as you know what you are looking for. How would you ever find out the name of command given just the function you wanted to execute? You can't. " One of my gripes with UNIX systems is how opaque they are

You should try 9front (Plan9) it's kind of the evolution of the Unix philosophy. http://9front.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

And afterwards try Inferno, which is what Plan 9 wanted to actually be like.

http://inferno-os.org/inferno/limbo.html

http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#29

Post by pjmlp »

ginko wrote: post #12

Well, maybe more people would have used VAX/VMS or OpenVMS if it had been open source.

Well, that is the only reason why UNIX won and we got stuck with C, it is hard to win against free beer with source code available.

The prices that Bell Labs was allowed to charge for symbolic UNIX licenses were a gift, when compared against traditional commercial OS prices in the 70's.

Re: A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)

#30

Post by nix23 »

pjmlp wrote: post #28
nix23 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should try 9front (Plan9) it's kind of the evolution of the Unix philosophy. http://9front.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

And afterwards try Inferno, which is what Plan 9 wanted to actually be like. http://inferno-os.org/inferno/limbo.html http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/

> which is what Plan 9 wanted to actually be like

No, not really can you proof that in any way?

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