6 ms·

“Unix is a junk operating system designed by a committee of PhDs.” -Dave Cutler (2004)

36 points by ethanpil 5y ago

ksaj 5y ago
I wonder what his thoughts are about his operating systems in comparison to the popularity of Unix-like operating systems today. Could we ever expect to see a VMS-like OS on Raspberry Pi?
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Windows 10 runs on a Raspberry Pi. That's an NT kernel-based OS with all the influence of VMS behind the scenes.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
garbagecoder 5y ago
* and that's a good thing. (=
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
> designed by a committee of PhDs We can only wish, alas!
- meepmorp 5y ago
  Do you take issue with the "designed" part or the bit about "a committee of PhDs?"
  - GauntletWizard 5y ago
    I take issue with both, and would not have it any other way. Unix has grown, sometimes in convoluted ways, but often through the path of least resistance which generally happens to be the shortest path.
- nunez 5y ago
  that's how you get software in 10 years instead of 10 days :-)
dontcare007 5y ago
Gotta remember how bad the early versions of Windows NT were...
- Postosuchus 5y ago
  Windows NT 3.x were pretty crappy performance-wise BUT... - They were still very logically (and somewhat elegantly) designed, well architected and portable. - They were amazingly stable (compared to the rest of the Windows family, that is).
  - ddtaylor 5y ago
    > compared to the rest of the Windows family, that is That's not saying much.
nunez 5y ago
tbf the reason why WinNT was so good compared to Win9x was because of Cutler's obsession with destroying Unix at all costs. I mean, WinNT didn't destroy Unix, but it's basically why it's not a joke in the server ecosystem anymore.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Win NT was "so good" because it had real multitasking and process isolation. About being a joke i am not sure. 25 years ago the idea of running NT as a server was a nightmare. Today it is the same, for different reasons.
mrlonglong 5y ago
Unix was originally designed and developed by two men!
guenthert 5y ago
The FUD is strong with this one.
elipsey 5y ago
Linked article on Cairo: https://web.archive.org/web/20070513113123/http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=48&DisplayTab=Article https://web.archive.org/web/20070513113123/http://www.window... The link gives HTTP 302, but doesn't load from the new location I guess?
linksnapzz 5y ago
One of my favorite quotes (forget who said it...) from the archives of the plan9 mailing list was someone frustrated with porting plan9 software to WindowsXP. To paraphrase, the writer describes XP as "just Windows 95 but with Cutler's greasy fingerprints all over it...".
kazinator 5y ago
Let's check the facts using Wikipedia: "Thompson received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and a master's degree in 1966, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his master's thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp." "[Dennis Ritchie] graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics." I think that an operating system where you can't rename or delete a file that is open by some process is idiotic beyond words, even without MS-DOS drive letter names thrown in. To work around the problem by providing a function to schedule a file rename at the next reboot is ironically cynical: you expect the system to crash often enough that this is viable.
- oshiar53-0 5y ago
  > I think that an operating system where you can't rename or delete a file that is open by some process is idiotic beyond words, This is not an inherent limitation of the VMS or NT architecture; I'd rather argue it's for compatibility. > even without MS-DOS drive letter names thrown in. This is also legacy carried over from DOS and OS/2.
  - kazinator 5y ago
    If you can't change it without breaking countless unknown appliction programs in the wild, it's part of the architecture. If you're incorporating uncool quirks from crappy previous operating systems into your new one, don't criticize Unix. Oh, and don't use its implementation language, and related concepts and techniques.
    - oshiar53-0 5y ago
      Are you mad? I didn't even criticize Unix at all!
kazinator 5y ago
> Cutler goes to great lengths to prevent people from optimizing for x86 in the early development of NT, despite the intense pressure to do so for performance reasons. He intuitively knew that sacrificing portability this early would cripple the future design of the OS. Is that so? Yet, no version of Windows has run on anything big endian. Linus Torvalds started Linux in a way that was totally geared toward 386. He used the 80368 memory segments of all things: the descriptor tables and all! Some of the 386-isms survived in some of the naming, like get_fs (named after the FS register): https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/182631/what-is-fs-short-for-in-kernel-function-get-fs https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/182631/what-is-fs-s... None of that stopped Linux from running on all sorts of stuff.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  That's not true: > The widely popular Windows NT 4.0 release carried initial support for Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC in addition to the Intel x86 platform
  - hulitu 5y ago
    Nt 4.0 was not "widely popular". And people heard about MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC ports from newspapers. As far as a i heard almost nobody ran those ports.
    - phendrenad2 5y ago
      NT 4.0 was "widely popular" when it came out. Consumer PCs didn't run it, so it's forgotten history. Anyway the question was whether NT ran on big-endian architectures, which I answered. I have nothing to say about how popular those ports were, only that they were easily technically achievable for the NT OS.
      - kazinator 5y ago
        You have no answered it at all. Dec Alpha is little-endian (little-endian only, I believe). MIPS and PowerPC are bi-endian (possibly depending on exact model? Maybe some can be switched, whereas some are fixed?) Windows NT ran on PowerPC in little endian mode. Hey look, A Reymond Chen article from 2018 mentions this: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180806-00/?p=99425 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180806-00/?p=99... The Pocket PC (later Windows CE, later Windows Mobile) were used on MIPS quite a bit. I did some Windows CE work on MIPS units. It was all little endian. I don't think NT on MIPS was any different.
musicale 5y ago
Did Ken Thompson have a Ph.D.?

36 points by ethanpil 5y ago

ksaj 5y ago

I wonder what his thoughts are about his operating systems in comparison to the popularity of Unix-like operating systems today. Could we ever expect to see a VMS-like OS on Raspberry Pi?

EvanAnderson 5y ago
Windows 10 runs on a Raspberry Pi. That's an NT kernel-based OS with all the influence of VMS behind the scenes.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

garbagecoder 5y ago

* and that's a good thing. (=

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

> designed by a committee of PhDs We can only wish, alas!

meepmorp 5y ago
Do you take issue with the "designed" part or the bit about "a committee of PhDs?"
- GauntletWizard 5y ago
  I take issue with both, and would not have it any other way. Unix has grown, sometimes in convoluted ways, but often through the path of least resistance which generally happens to be the shortest path.
nunez 5y ago
that's how you get software in 10 years instead of 10 days :-)

dontcare007 5y ago

Gotta remember how bad the early versions of Windows NT were...

Postosuchus 5y ago
Windows NT 3.x were pretty crappy performance-wise BUT... - They were still very logically (and somewhat elegantly) designed, well architected and portable. - They were amazingly stable (compared to the rest of the Windows family, that is).
- ddtaylor 5y ago
  > compared to the rest of the Windows family, that is That's not saying much.

nunez 5y ago

tbf the reason why WinNT was so good compared to Win9x was because of Cutler's obsession with destroying Unix at all costs. I mean, WinNT didn't destroy Unix, but it's basically why it's not a joke in the server ecosystem anymore.

hulitu 5y ago
Win NT was "so good" because it had real multitasking and process isolation. About being a joke i am not sure. 25 years ago the idea of running NT as a server was a nightmare. Today it is the same, for different reasons.

mrlonglong 5y ago

Unix was originally designed and developed by two men!

guenthert 5y ago

The FUD is strong with this one.

elipsey 5y ago

Linked article on Cairo: https://web.archive.org/web/20070513113123/http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=48&DisplayTab=Article https://web.archive.org/web/20070513113123/http://www.window... The link gives HTTP 302, but doesn't load from the new location I guess?

linksnapzz 5y ago

One of my favorite quotes (forget who said it...) from the archives of the plan9 mailing list was someone frustrated with porting plan9 software to WindowsXP. To paraphrase, the writer describes XP as "just Windows 95 but with Cutler's greasy fingerprints all over it...".

kazinator 5y ago

Let's check the facts using Wikipedia: "Thompson received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and a master's degree in 1966, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his master's thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp." "[Dennis Ritchie] graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics." I think that an operating system where you can't rename or delete a file that is open by some process is idiotic beyond words, even without MS-DOS drive letter names thrown in. To work around the problem by providing a function to schedule a file rename at the next reboot is ironically cynical: you expect the system to crash often enough that this is viable.

oshiar53-0 5y ago
> I think that an operating system where you can't rename or delete a file that is open by some process is idiotic beyond words, This is not an inherent limitation of the VMS or NT architecture; I'd rather argue it's for compatibility. > even without MS-DOS drive letter names thrown in. This is also legacy carried over from DOS and OS/2.
- kazinator 5y ago
  If you can't change it without breaking countless unknown appliction programs in the wild, it's part of the architecture. If you're incorporating uncool quirks from crappy previous operating systems into your new one, don't criticize Unix. Oh, and don't use its implementation language, and related concepts and techniques.
  - oshiar53-0 5y ago
    Are you mad? I didn't even criticize Unix at all!

kazinator 5y ago

> Cutler goes to great lengths to prevent people from optimizing for x86 in the early development of NT, despite the intense pressure to do so for performance reasons. He intuitively knew that sacrificing portability this early would cripple the future design of the OS. Is that so? Yet, no version of Windows has run on anything big endian. Linus Torvalds started Linux in a way that was totally geared toward 386. He used the 80368 memory segments of all things: the descriptor tables and all! Some of the 386-isms survived in some of the naming, like get_fs (named after the FS register): https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/182631/what-is-fs-short-for-in-kernel-function-get-fs https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/182631/what-is-fs-s... None of that stopped Linux from running on all sorts of stuff.

phendrenad2 5y ago
That's not true: > The widely popular Windows NT 4.0 release carried initial support for Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC in addition to the Intel x86 platform
- hulitu 5y ago
  Nt 4.0 was not "widely popular". And people heard about MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC ports from newspapers. As far as a i heard almost nobody ran those ports.
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    NT 4.0 was "widely popular" when it came out. Consumer PCs didn't run it, so it's forgotten history. Anyway the question was whether NT ran on big-endian architectures, which I answered. I have nothing to say about how popular those ports were, only that they were easily technically achievable for the NT OS.
    - kazinator 5y ago
      You have no answered it at all. Dec Alpha is little-endian (little-endian only, I believe). MIPS and PowerPC are bi-endian (possibly depending on exact model? Maybe some can be switched, whereas some are fixed?) Windows NT ran on PowerPC in little endian mode. Hey look, A Reymond Chen article from 2018 mentions this: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180806-00/?p=99425 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180806-00/?p=99... The Pocket PC (later Windows CE, later Windows Mobile) were used on MIPS quite a bit. I did some Windows CE work on MIPS units. It was all little endian. I don't think NT on MIPS was any different.

musicale 5y ago

Did Ken Thompson have a Ph.D.?