6 ms·

Amen to that. Unix was never a good design, and now is severely out of date. We can no longer afford to hack around it.

jaas 8y ago
"Unix was never a good design" Nothing's perfect. Unix was a great design that served its purpose well for a long time, and evolved a bit along the way. Saying it was "never good" is trivializing and, in my opinion, arrogant.
- dllthomas 8y ago
  There were always objections. "Unix went from being the worst operating system available, to being the best operating system available, without getting appreciably better." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 Which isn't to say that those POV were necessarily correct, just that it isn't all hindsight.
  - the_af 8y ago
    To be fair, there are always objections to any working piece of technology. It's not helpful to claim "it was never good design". It was a working design that drove technology to the point it is now, and in that sense it was hugely successful. What kind of perfect and pure tech do some people want, anyway? Pick anything, whatever they like -- say, Plan 9 or OS/2 or whatever -- and I can bet you in a parallel universe where that tech won, someone on para-HN will claim that it sucked and it was never a good design and if only Unix had won.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - dllthomas 8y ago
      I certainly don't disagree that it was successful, and (coming into technology when I did) I've always personally liked it. I just found the writings around what came before interesting. > I can bet you in a parallel universe where that tech won, someone on para-HN will claim that it sucked and it was never a good design and if only Unix had won. I'd take the same side of that bet as you :-P
thaumaturgy 8y ago
Yeah, Unix was a terrible design. Composable architecture combined with standardized i/o and IPC models. I can't imagine anything worse, especially compared to today's proliferation of data formats and inscrutable APIs. It's a good thing nobody uses it anymore.
- taborj 8y ago
  My Online Sarcasm Detector(tm) is beeping wildly
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Had Bell Labs been allowed to sell it in first place and that would have been exactly its outcome.
  - jstimpfle 8y ago
    missing the sarcasm?
    - Ericson2314 8y ago
      I think you are.
pzs 8y ago
Would you care to elaborate why Unix, in your opinion, was never a good design?
- pjmlp 8y ago
  It was re-written on an unsafe language that completely disregarded what has happened outside Bell Labs since 1961, at Burroughs, IBM, MIT, Xerox and other research cathedrals. It only took off thanks to Bell Labs being forbidden to sell it, so it got offered for a symbolic price, alongside source code to major universities, which then decided to build on top, instead of paying OS street prices. Had UNIX been sold in the same vein as other mainframe OSes and no one would be talking about whatever quality it might have had.
  - systemBuilder 8y ago
    I worked on the xerox product OS (Pilot) written by my manager, and was on the team with the designers of Multics and Swift, MIT's OSes. At MIT we all ran 4.15bsd and then 4.2bsd and UNIX was so far ahead we focused on improving it, mostly. Pilot, Multics, CTSS, were nowhere near as powerful or developer friendly as UNIX. UNIX killed off OS research for a long time!
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Given what I know from XDE and Cedar, I fail to see how a text based CLI, without the graphical debuggers, REPL and GUI workflows was more developer friendly.
  - Ericson2314 8y ago
    Thank you for being a breadth of wisdom in the UNIX-worshiping wilderness. You can always get mindshare being first massively underpriced thing to market.
    - jstimpfle 8y ago
      Only that this doesn't even touch on design, or what parts could have been done better.
FussyZeus 8y ago
What a ridiculous statement. Yeah if it was possible to just jump to the best solution each time then we'd benefit massively, but that's not how any science works. The new awesome thing is always built on the back of what was done before. Electric cars have been around since the inception of the internal combustion engine but we didn't have electrical supplies with the energy density of gasoline to make electric cars possible until decades later, and modern life would've been (and remains, unfortunately) impossible without the energy density of fossil fuels. Hopefully someday we'll get past that, but when that happens, that doesn't then mean that fossil fuels were just a bad idea, they were the only stepping stone to what replaced them.
- Ericson2314 8y ago
  The other OSes from Unix's era were already as good or better (or at very least there was a diversity of ideas). Then the regulation that prevent AT&T from being sold like the others causes Unix to win prematurely. Maybe that's how Ford beat the earlier luxury cars in raw profit, but that's not how the ICE beat electric cars.
dekhn 8y ago
UNIX was a great design for a wide range of people. FOr example, multiple domains of science were transformed because UNIX made it easy to implement microcomputers for data collection on realtime data and share the resulting software among a pool of other researchers.
wongarsu 8y ago
Which is why we have Windows with the NT family of kernels. It's a reimagining that contains great ideas like a flexible file system stack that allows you to dynamically add drivers that add encryption, compression, antivirus checks etc, and a few bad ideas like a flexible file system stack that's orders of magnitude slower when working with small files than unix implementations. Windows is a mainstream OS that is very different from Unix in many regards (even if it still has files). And it really shows that the grass isn't greener on the other side: some parts are great, some parts are terrible, but there aren't a lot of things that offer a universally better tradeoff.
- Ericson2314 8y ago
  The VMS people Microsoft poached and then straightjacketed with legacy concerns did have good ideas, yes.
ncmncm 8y ago
There are only two kinds of OS: the ones people complain about, and the ones no one uses.

jaas 8y ago

"Unix was never a good design" Nothing's perfect. Unix was a great design that served its purpose well for a long time, and evolved a bit along the way. Saying it was "never good" is trivializing and, in my opinion, arrogant.

dllthomas 8y ago
There were always objections. "Unix went from being the worst operating system available, to being the best operating system available, without getting appreciably better." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 Which isn't to say that those POV were necessarily correct, just that it isn't all hindsight.
- the_af 8y ago
  To be fair, there are always objections to any working piece of technology. It's not helpful to claim "it was never good design". It was a working design that drove technology to the point it is now, and in that sense it was hugely successful. What kind of perfect and pure tech do some people want, anyway? Pick anything, whatever they like -- say, Plan 9 or OS/2 or whatever -- and I can bet you in a parallel universe where that tech won, someone on para-HN will claim that it sucked and it was never a good design and if only Unix had won.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dllthomas 8y ago
    I certainly don't disagree that it was successful, and (coming into technology when I did) I've always personally liked it. I just found the writings around what came before interesting. > I can bet you in a parallel universe where that tech won, someone on para-HN will claim that it sucked and it was never a good design and if only Unix had won. I'd take the same side of that bet as you :-P

thaumaturgy 8y ago

Yeah, Unix was a terrible design. Composable architecture combined with standardized i/o and IPC models. I can't imagine anything worse, especially compared to today's proliferation of data formats and inscrutable APIs. It's a good thing nobody uses it anymore.

taborj 8y ago
My Online Sarcasm Detector(tm) is beeping wildly
pjmlp 8y ago
Had Bell Labs been allowed to sell it in first place and that would have been exactly its outcome.
- jstimpfle 8y ago
  missing the sarcasm?
  - Ericson2314 8y ago
    I think you are.

pzs 8y ago

Would you care to elaborate why Unix, in your opinion, was never a good design?

pjmlp 8y ago
It was re-written on an unsafe language that completely disregarded what has happened outside Bell Labs since 1961, at Burroughs, IBM, MIT, Xerox and other research cathedrals. It only took off thanks to Bell Labs being forbidden to sell it, so it got offered for a symbolic price, alongside source code to major universities, which then decided to build on top, instead of paying OS street prices. Had UNIX been sold in the same vein as other mainframe OSes and no one would be talking about whatever quality it might have had.
- systemBuilder 8y ago
  I worked on the xerox product OS (Pilot) written by my manager, and was on the team with the designers of Multics and Swift, MIT's OSes. At MIT we all ran 4.15bsd and then 4.2bsd and UNIX was so far ahead we focused on improving it, mostly. Pilot, Multics, CTSS, were nowhere near as powerful or developer friendly as UNIX. UNIX killed off OS research for a long time!
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Given what I know from XDE and Cedar, I fail to see how a text based CLI, without the graphical debuggers, REPL and GUI workflows was more developer friendly.
- Ericson2314 8y ago
  Thank you for being a breadth of wisdom in the UNIX-worshiping wilderness. You can always get mindshare being first massively underpriced thing to market.
  - jstimpfle 8y ago
    Only that this doesn't even touch on design, or what parts could have been done better.

FussyZeus 8y ago

What a ridiculous statement. Yeah if it was possible to just jump to the best solution each time then we'd benefit massively, but that's not how any science works. The new awesome thing is always built on the back of what was done before. Electric cars have been around since the inception of the internal combustion engine but we didn't have electrical supplies with the energy density of gasoline to make electric cars possible until decades later, and modern life would've been (and remains, unfortunately) impossible without the energy density of fossil fuels. Hopefully someday we'll get past that, but when that happens, that doesn't then mean that fossil fuels were just a bad idea, they were the only stepping stone to what replaced them.

Ericson2314 8y ago
The other OSes from Unix's era were already as good or better (or at very least there was a diversity of ideas). Then the regulation that prevent AT&T from being sold like the others causes Unix to win prematurely. Maybe that's how Ford beat the earlier luxury cars in raw profit, but that's not how the ICE beat electric cars.

dekhn 8y ago

UNIX was a great design for a wide range of people. FOr example, multiple domains of science were transformed because UNIX made it easy to implement microcomputers for data collection on realtime data and share the resulting software among a pool of other researchers.

wongarsu 8y ago

Which is why we have Windows with the NT family of kernels. It's a reimagining that contains great ideas like a flexible file system stack that allows you to dynamically add drivers that add encryption, compression, antivirus checks etc, and a few bad ideas like a flexible file system stack that's orders of magnitude slower when working with small files than unix implementations. Windows is a mainstream OS that is very different from Unix in many regards (even if it still has files). And it really shows that the grass isn't greener on the other side: some parts are great, some parts are terrible, but there aren't a lot of things that offer a universally better tradeoff.

Ericson2314 8y ago
The VMS people Microsoft poached and then straightjacketed with legacy concerns did have good ideas, yes.

ncmncm 8y ago

There are only two kinds of OS: the ones people complain about, and the ones no one uses.