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I did not know about this! http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf It even has an anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie whic

I did not know about this! http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf It even has an anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie which kinda reminds me of the Metropolitan Police spokesman's blurb on the back of Banksy's book. BTW, it starts off with an anonymous quote that I've never heard, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. Unix is of course from Bell Labs. And anyone who knew anything would have said instead, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and BSD which at least would have been funny if still inaccurate. Anyways, it seems like a fun rant of a book which I'd never heard of. The above point about not getting it can be applied to Linux as well. Lessons learned elsewhere are stupid until Linus finally understands them and then they're obvious.

haberman 10y ago
From the book: "Did you know that all the standard Sun window applications (“tools”) are really one massive 3/4 megabyte binary?" Oh for the days when 750kB was considered "massive" for a binary.
- Koshkin 10y ago
  IIRC, the original (1969) version of UNIX was designed to run on a computer with 24 kilobytes of RAM.
  - AceJohnny2 10y ago
    Oh the days without process isolation and memory management.
  - aap_ 10y ago
    The original UNIX ran on a PDP-7, which didn't have bytes. The memory was 8k of 18 bit words.
- VintageCool 10y ago
  Heh. That reminds me of the article from last year that Apple was distributing many Unix programs as a single binary. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/04/17/unprotected/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/04/17/unprotected/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517894
- brandmeyer 10y ago
  cough cough Busybox cough
jff 10y ago
The whole document is great but the anti-forward is so good I'm going to risk downvotes by reproducing it in its (short) entirety here, emphasis mine: From: dmr@plan9.research.att.com Date: 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 memories. 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, they are intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat, lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1 you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and addled by puffiness of the genome. Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost com- patible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred. Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining. Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy. Bon appetit!
- pvg 10y ago
  It's 'foreword'. And I think some of the rants inside are even better than this.
- bcantrill 10y ago
  Thank you for posting this here; I absolutely love that anti-foreward, and it was life-changing for me in that it offered shelter to those of us who were defending Unix during a very, very dark time (namely, the mid-1990s). I have also (shamelessly) cribbed dmr's beautiful closing metaphor of a fecal pie and its "undigested nuggets of nutrition" -- it seems to just describe so much that is not entirely devoid of value, but it utterly foul nonetheless.
tannhaeuser 10y ago
And LSD is of course from Albert Hofmann [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann
- dekhn 10y ago
  It's a reference to Owsley Stanley (Bear), who had an LSD lab in Berkeley (it's mentioned in Tom Perkins's memoir). http://berkeleyplaques.org/e-plaque/owsley-stanley/ http://berkeleyplaques.org/e-plaque/owsley-stanley/
vacri 10y ago
> Lessons learned elsewhere are stupid until Linus finally understands them and then they're obvious. I think you're suffering from selection bias.
- CalChris 10y ago
  I do have a bias against select(2) but I'm not alone: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/banga/banga_html/node3.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/ban...
monochromatic 10y ago
From the anti-foreward: > Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy. > Bon appetit! Pretty good.
cat199 10y ago
> Unix is of course from Bell Labs Research Unix, yes. But the culture of unix is much bigger than some single copyright holder... this is why the entire thing is plain stupid. Study the levenez family tree. Read the archived Usenet posts and get a copy of the Cuckoos Egg. BSD IS UNIX.

haberman 10y ago

From the book: "Did you know that all the standard Sun window applications (“tools”) are really one massive 3/4 megabyte binary?" Oh for the days when 750kB was considered "massive" for a binary.

Koshkin 10y ago
IIRC, the original (1969) version of UNIX was designed to run on a computer with 24 kilobytes of RAM.
- AceJohnny2 10y ago
  Oh the days without process isolation and memory management.
- aap_ 10y ago
  The original UNIX ran on a PDP-7, which didn't have bytes. The memory was 8k of 18 bit words.
VintageCool 10y ago
Heh. That reminds me of the article from last year that Apple was distributing many Unix programs as a single binary. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/04/17/unprotected/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/04/17/unprotected/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11517894
brandmeyer 10y ago
cough cough Busybox cough

jff 10y ago

The whole document is great but the anti-forward is so good I'm going to risk downvotes by reproducing it in its (short) entirety here, emphasis mine: From: dmr@plan9.research.att.com Date: 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 memories. 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, they are intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat, lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1 you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and addled by puffiness of the genome. Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost com- patible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred. Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining. Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy. Bon appetit!

pvg 10y ago
It's 'foreword'. And I think some of the rants inside are even better than this.
bcantrill 10y ago
Thank you for posting this here; I absolutely love that anti-foreward, and it was life-changing for me in that it offered shelter to those of us who were defending Unix during a very, very dark time (namely, the mid-1990s). I have also (shamelessly) cribbed dmr's beautiful closing metaphor of a fecal pie and its "undigested nuggets of nutrition" -- it seems to just describe so much that is not entirely devoid of value, but it utterly foul nonetheless.

tannhaeuser 10y ago

And LSD is of course from Albert Hofmann [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann

dekhn 10y ago
It's a reference to Owsley Stanley (Bear), who had an LSD lab in Berkeley (it's mentioned in Tom Perkins's memoir). http://berkeleyplaques.org/e-plaque/owsley-stanley/ http://berkeleyplaques.org/e-plaque/owsley-stanley/

vacri 10y ago

> Lessons learned elsewhere are stupid until Linus finally understands them and then they're obvious. I think you're suffering from selection bias.

CalChris 10y ago
I do have a bias against select(2) but I'm not alone: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/banga/banga_html/node3.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/full_papers/ban...

monochromatic 10y ago

From the anti-foreward: > Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy. > Bon appetit! Pretty good.

cat199 10y ago

> Unix is of course from Bell Labs Research Unix, yes. But the culture of unix is much bigger than some single copyright holder... this is why the entire thing is plain stupid. Study the levenez family tree. Read the archived Usenet posts and get a copy of the Cuckoos Egg. BSD IS UNIX.