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Tue, 15 Mar 1994 00:38:07 EST Subject: anti-foreword To the contributers to this book: I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memo- ries. The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below. Your judgments are not keen,…
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> People have a tendency to gravitate towards free stuff regarless how bad the quality happens to be. Where does the MS operating system fit in here? Arguably the worst general-computing OS, but by far the most popular. For purpose of discussion, do you consider it free due to being widely pirated? I'll say that the developer experience on Windows was excellent around the 1995-2005 timeframe. But the user experience…
It's "free" because the cost is built into the hardware---MS had licensing terms that made selling hardware without a license a poor choice. As a result, it was preinstalled and no one looked at any alternatives.
This is one of my favorite books, and I own the hard-copy. As I was reading it, I found that a lot of the problems mentioned seem to be affecting Windows and macOS, while Linux based distros have them resolved. I found the commentary and history both hilarious and informative. The anti-forward by Dennis Ritchie is also very funny. If anyone has found similar CS style humor books, please let me know!
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So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s? OS/2 was pretty solid...
The OS/2 part was, the DOS/Win comparability later not so much. Workplace Shell was so cool though.
Of course OS/2 was later severely hampered by its inability to run Win32 apps, but that's another story.
I think it was jwz who said “Linux sucks, it just sucks less than everything else.”
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> People have a tendency to gravitate towards free stuff regarless how bad the quality happens to be. Where does the MS operating system fit in here? Arguably the worst general-computing OS, but by far the most popular. For purpose of discussion, do you consider it free due to being widely pirated? I'll say that the developer experience on Windows was excellent around the 1995-2005 timeframe. But the user experience…
Worst compared to what? Microsoft gained its original OS dominance with MS-DOS when the primary competitor was CP/M.
Obviously it’s great in a VM!
This is a tongue in cheek but also piece of shit MIT propaganda piece mostly written by the clowns who created the abortions that were Multics and LISPMs. Like as if every software engineer should start their next project by warming up their soldering irons to add obscure new features to their CPU's! I know because I attended that school and worked with the fathers of Multics. The sad fact is that MIT produces extrem…
I'll assume you're talking about systemd here? How is linux being strangled? How is it Europe's fault? As far as I can see linux is booming and almost ubiquitous as far as backend OS's go...
UNIX succeeded precisely because it was powerful and yet so simple a person could read any part of it and change it.
However, the kernel of UNIX is now beyond ken for most developers precisely because the developers pursued complexity and marginal features for marginal benefits, something very common in European governments and a part of that culture.
The shell commands went from maybe 50kloc to millions of lines precisely because the Linux developers were desperate for contributions and let MIT bloatware people control that part of the source code, strangling Linux with MIT culture.
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I'll assume you're talking about systemd here? How is linux being strangled? How is it Europe's fault? As far as I can see linux is booming and almost ubiquitous as far as backend OS's go...
No this is not a rant about systemd. The idea behind UNIX was a small set of lego building blocks that could be plugged together to construct something way larger than the parts themselves. The idea in Linux is that once you become an open source contributor more software is always better and more features is always better and hey why doesn't everyone build a monolith with 150 subcommands, which does not interoperate…
I founded the mailing list the book was based on. These days I say, Unix went from being the worst operating system available, to being the best operating system available, without getting appreciably better. (which may not be entirely accurate, but don't flame me). And still miss my Lisp Machine. It's not that Unix is really that bad, it's that it has a certain model of computer use which has crowded out the more am…
> And still miss my Lisp Machine[...] This all happened before my time, but having read a lot about the Lisp Machine I'm as interested in the what-ifs of history if it had won out as the next guy. I wonder though how much of the legitimate sentiment in this book is simply raging against a machine that's successful and installed in production. Given widespread commercial use a system where you could modify the running…
Plus it's too easy to "reinvent the language" in Lisp. In C-based languages, the block structures (if, while, try, etc.) are pretty much hard-wired into the language so they stay consistent. In Lisp, one can roll their own. It's great if you are the lone reader: you can customize it to fit your head. But, other readers may not agree with your head's ideal model, or learning it adds to the learning curve of a new shop.
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It's "free" because the cost is built into the hardware---MS had licensing terms that made selling hardware without a license a poor choice. As a result, it was preinstalled and no one looked at any alternatives.
In the context of the GP's post, that is free. The user did not have to outlay any more money to acquire it.