4 ms·

I'm slightly too young to have lived through it myself, but from what my dad told me, pre-GNU Unix and post-GNU Unix are almost completely different in their us

by ken 8y ago

I'm slightly too young to have lived through it myself, but from what my dad told me, pre-GNU Unix and post-GNU Unix are almost completely different in their user experience. Prior to GNU, Unix (the tools and the kernel) used to simply crash a lot, or drop data. It was not an especially good system in any regard. As the GNU coding standards say: > Avoid arbitrary limits on the length or number of any data structure, including file names, lines, files, and symbols, by allocating all data structures dynamically. In most Unix utilities, “long lines are silently truncated”. This is not acceptable in a GNU utility. This never really clicked with me because I didn't live through a time when my primary Unix utilities weren't robust. The closest I got was using old (1990's) HP/UX and Solaris and AIX systems where the sysadmins had installed the GNU tools already. All I knew is that I shouldn't use the system tools, because they were worse. Personally, I think what helped Unix succeed is that the implementations were bad but the architecture made it (mostly) possible to improve the implementations piecemeal. Accordingly, the parts that have had the most trouble improving (like X11, and C) are those where the design doesn't allow this.

pjmlp 8y ago
Yes, using standard POSIX tools wasn't the best experience of the world. What helped Unix succeed was that originally Bell Labs wasn't allowed to sell it, so they gave it to universities for what was a symbolic price in comparisasion what a standard OS used to cost, alongside its source code. So naturally many stundents from those universities went out and started businesses based on UNIX, like Sun for example. One of the reasons behing the BSD lawsuit was that AT&T got the license to charge for UNIX after Bell Labs was broken down into smaller units and they were trying to kill off those free branches. People have a tendency to gravitate towards free stuff regarless how bad the quality happens to be.
- x122 8y ago
  Eh, what? At the time (1994) the handbook was written reasonably priced alternatives were MacOS and Windows, both of which froze all the time and had horrible programming environments. AIX, non-free, was notoriously horrible, too. And the Wirth systems that you promote here were actually free. So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    From reading it I recall it was less about contemporary alternatives (which all sucked), and more about how UNIX displaced better environments in the 70s/80s.
  - einr 8y ago
    So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s? OS/2 was pretty solid...
    - adestefan 8y ago
      The OS/2 part was, the DOS/Win comparability later not so much. Workplace Shell was so cool though.
      - einr 8y ago
        Not sure what was bad about the DOS and Windows compatibility? OS/2 was frequently touted as "better DOS than DOS, better Windows than Windows" and it was generally true. You could multitask DOS apps (lots of people used this for running multi-line BBSes and so forth) and Win16 apps could crash without bringing down the whole system. Of course OS/2 was later severely hampered by its inability to run Win32 apps, but that's another story.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    Digital Research produced some nice usable systems in the early 80s. MP/M was a multitasking version of CP/M available by 1981. In the mainframe world, TOPS-10/20 and VMS were both exemplary. From the user POV, the former was one of the best command-line systems ever created, with none of the insane user-hostility built into UNIX command naming. Dave "VMS -> NT" Cutler absolutely hated Unix, and it shows. But we're really comparing cinder blocks and potatoes. UNIX was designed as a hobby/student hacker tool, not as a general user OS. Many of the design choices are bizarre and frankly stupid, as the book delights in pointing out. But hackers love UNIX because using it just it feels just like hacking code, and that's considered a good thing. It wouldn't be impossible to design an OS with powerful command line options but a sensible command naming system, much more intelligent and reliable security, a modern filesystem, and so on - and perhaps add some of the user configurability and extendability of the Lisp/Smalltalk/Hypercard(?) world. But UNIX is so embedded now it would be a purely academic exercise.
- dotancohen 8y ago
  > 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 was horrible, yet it remained an almost monopoly on the desktop.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    It was the OS for PCs, only geeks and some IT departments ever bothered updating their OSes. Regular consumers just handle their computers like appliances, getting a new one with whatever OS it gets bundled with. The monopoly worked both ways, any OEM was free to ditch Microsoft agreements, they just cared to improve their profits by getting into bed with Microsoft.
  - nradov 8y ago
    Worst compared to what? Microsoft gained its original OS dominance with MS-DOS when the primary competitor was CP/M.
    - chronogram 8y ago
      And for the post 2005 timeframe, I don’t see any alternatives for general purpose desktop operating systems. Can’t install macOS on a device, and while I use Linux systems a lot, I don’t think anyone really develops it for desktop usage. I did hear you can have variable refresh rate monitors in the next Ubuntu release, but no idea about power management and hardware video decoding and all that.. Obviously it’s great in a VM!
  - mcguire 8y ago
    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.

by ken 8y ago

pjmlp 8y ago

Yes, using standard POSIX tools wasn't the best experience of the world. What helped Unix succeed was that originally Bell Labs wasn't allowed to sell it, so they gave it to universities for what was a symbolic price in comparisasion what a standard OS used to cost, alongside its source code. So naturally many stundents from those universities went out and started businesses based on UNIX, like Sun for example. One of the reasons behing the BSD lawsuit was that AT&T got the license to charge for UNIX after Bell Labs was broken down into smaller units and they were trying to kill off those free branches. People have a tendency to gravitate towards free stuff regarless how bad the quality happens to be.

x122 8y ago
Eh, what? At the time (1994) the handbook was written reasonably priced alternatives were MacOS and Windows, both of which froze all the time and had horrible programming environments. AIX, non-free, was notoriously horrible, too. And the Wirth systems that you promote here were actually free. So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  From reading it I recall it was less about contemporary alternatives (which all sucked), and more about how UNIX displaced better environments in the 70s/80s.
- einr 8y ago
  So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s? OS/2 was pretty solid...
  - adestefan 8y ago
    The OS/2 part was, the DOS/Win comparability later not so much. Workplace Shell was so cool though.
    - einr 8y ago
      Not sure what was bad about the DOS and Windows compatibility? OS/2 was frequently touted as "better DOS than DOS, better Windows than Windows" and it was generally true. You could multitask DOS apps (lots of people used this for running multi-line BBSes and so forth) and Win16 apps could crash without bringing down the whole system. Of course OS/2 was later severely hampered by its inability to run Win32 apps, but that's another story.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  Digital Research produced some nice usable systems in the early 80s. MP/M was a multitasking version of CP/M available by 1981. In the mainframe world, TOPS-10/20 and VMS were both exemplary. From the user POV, the former was one of the best command-line systems ever created, with none of the insane user-hostility built into UNIX command naming. Dave "VMS -> NT" Cutler absolutely hated Unix, and it shows. But we're really comparing cinder blocks and potatoes. UNIX was designed as a hobby/student hacker tool, not as a general user OS. Many of the design choices are bizarre and frankly stupid, as the book delights in pointing out. But hackers love UNIX because using it just it feels just like hacking code, and that's considered a good thing. It wouldn't be impossible to design an OS with powerful command line options but a sensible command naming system, much more intelligent and reliable security, a modern filesystem, and so on - and perhaps add some of the user configurability and extendability of the Lisp/Smalltalk/Hypercard(?) world. But UNIX is so embedded now it would be a purely academic exercise.
dotancohen 8y ago
> 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 was horrible, yet it remained an almost monopoly on the desktop.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  It was the OS for PCs, only geeks and some IT departments ever bothered updating their OSes. Regular consumers just handle their computers like appliances, getting a new one with whatever OS it gets bundled with. The monopoly worked both ways, any OEM was free to ditch Microsoft agreements, they just cared to improve their profits by getting into bed with Microsoft.
- nradov 8y ago
  Worst compared to what? Microsoft gained its original OS dominance with MS-DOS when the primary competitor was CP/M.
  - chronogram 8y ago
    And for the post 2005 timeframe, I don’t see any alternatives for general purpose desktop operating systems. Can’t install macOS on a device, and while I use Linux systems a lot, I don’t think anyone really develops it for desktop usage. I did hear you can have variable refresh rate monitors in the next Ubuntu release, but no idea about power management and hardware video decoding and all that.. Obviously it’s great in a VM!
- mcguire 8y ago
  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.