51–60 of 286 posts
> There is no effective way to find out how to use Unix, other than sitting next to an adept and asking for help That's a rather unfair claim. Hundreds of books and tutorials have been written to introduce people to Unix...
This was written decades ago, when computers mostly lived in universities and the only way to learn Unix was by etc.
I remain amazed that the #1 shipper of Unix systems today is .. Apple. I grew up on Unix in the 80's, cut my teeth on MIPS RISC/os and then Irix and SunOS and all the joys of the very first days of Linux, oh my .. and I was fully prepared to be an SGI fanboy for the rest of my life - and then, they abandoned Irix and shipped NT. sadface So when the tiBook came out, and it was promised to have a Unix on it, I jumped o…
A number of legendary companies with great potential misstepped, GRiD, Blackberry, Be, MasPar, Thinking Machines, GO corp, Intergraph, heck go back to the Evans & Sutherland LDS-1 in 1969 or when BBN decided not to get into hardware after making the first internet hardware ever, the IMP. Or how about how SRI fumbled the ball after Englebarts work or SDS, who made a bunch of the NASA Apollo hardware.
The world is littered with great technology companies that didn't stick around because we determine success and failure by handshakes on the golf course.
Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later. POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes. Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or somethi…
Getting help on Unix commands, particularly in Linux, has always been a mess. On most Linux distros, typing "help" will give you help about the shell built-ins. Then, discovering "man", you soon find that the bundled GNU utils of course would rather you use their "info" system, which in turn may refer to a web page(!) for info.
I remember coming from the Amiga to Linux: I would not have gotten far without word-of-mouth help (and helpful computer magazine articles explaining a lot of the particularities of Unix). The Amiga, on the other hand, was a cheap home computer with an exceptionally thick manual detailing every single command clearly and succinctly.
The Open Group has the POSIX util spec published online[0] and also allow free downloads of it for personal use. Since I discovered it, I find myself using it much more often than man pages. I've made a little alias in bash that launches Dillo with the appropriate command page.
[0] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/c...
Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later. POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes. Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or somethi…
> POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. I want it to be improved but I fear it is becoming irrelevant. There are very few OSes left to be compatible with...
> [the name] Grep suggests to me that the author of this one had been reading too much Robert Heinlein (you grok?), or possibly --- and this is in fact quite likely --- was under the influence of psychotropic substances at the time. As funny as this is, the actual origin for "grep" is even more interesting – and, at least to me, quite mnemonic. "grep" comes from ed, and stands for the command "g/re/p", that is global…
He's saying it as if it's a bad thing?...
Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later. POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes. Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or somethi…
Only defect is they did not go with Yoda speak (Get- is a much worse filter that NetA to search for Get-NetAdapter for instance).
It's still a bit green on Linux environments, but it already beats many of the alternatives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Where GREP Came From" by Brian Kernighan from Computerphile: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTfOnGZUZDk For those unfamiliar, Kernighan is the "K" in K&R C and the "K" in AWK: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan
Great interview with Brian on Lex Fridman's podcast - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9upVbGSBFo
I don't know how I ended up subscribing to Lex Fridman's podcast, but it's both wonderful and somewhat bizarre to me.
On the one hand, he comes across as the kind of character you'd expect in a horror film. Meticulous, well-dressed, friendly, but affectless in his speech and oddly emotionless and formal.
But then the actual questions he asks, and the observations he makes, are IMO a step above most interviewers. I can think of a number of 'greater' interviewers, but he's definitely well in the 'very good' range.
My apologies if Fridman reads this comment. I definitely don't want you to stop doing things the way you do :). It's just somewhat different, in a strangely 'boring' way, that I'm not used to from most good podcast hosts that I'm familiar with. Most are, sometimes to the point of irritation, exceedingly affable and chatty.
I remain amazed that the #1 shipper of Unix systems today is .. Apple. I grew up on Unix in the 80's, cut my teeth on MIPS RISC/os and then Irix and SunOS and all the joys of the very first days of Linux, oh my .. and I was fully prepared to be an SGI fanboy for the rest of my life - and then, they abandoned Irix and shipped NT. sadface So when the tiBook came out, and it was promised to have a Unix on it, I jumped o…
They made a rather strange o2 laptop that never made it to production. A number of legendary companies with great potential misstepped, GRiD, Blackberry, Be, MasPar, Thinking Machines, GO corp, Intergraph, heck go back to the Evans & Sutherland LDS-1 in 1969 or when BBN decided not to get into hardware after making the first internet hardware ever, the IMP. Or how about how SRI fumbled the ball after Englebarts work…
You're right about that golfing handshake.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but largely (functionally) indistinguishable from a UNIX machine when accessing it via teletype (glass or otherwise). I disagree. I first sat down at a VMS terminal in a library in North Carolina when the OPAC broke and dropped me back to a prompt. I knew Linux passably well at that point but had never used VMS before. I typed ls, tried dir, that worked, and finally tried help. In half an hour I was investigating t…
I just tried 'help' on a linux system. It is absolute garbage.
> There is no effective way to find out how to use Unix, other than sitting next to an adept and asking for help That's a rather unfair claim. Hundreds of books and tutorials have been written to introduce people to Unix...
Now. This was written decades ago, when computers mostly lived in universities and the only way to learn Unix was by etc.
It's also coming either after, or at the same time as books like "The Magic Garden Explained" which explains SVR4 in considerable detail.
You should read stuff like this as at least 90% sour grapes. Is there value from some of the criticisms along the way? Sure, but mostly they're just angry because the thing they liked is clearly going away.