3 ms·

If you were an old timer, I would love to hear, how significant was Evi Nemeth's UNIX administration handbook to you? I myself learned a ton from it, but as I

by dmazin 3y ago

If you were an old timer, I would love to hear, how significant was Evi Nemeth's UNIX administration handbook to you? I myself learned a ton from it, but as I understand, it used to be the bible.

scarygliders 3y ago
> how significant was Evi Nemeth's UNIX administration handbook to you? Never encountered it. I presume it was available in the UK, but my Unix courses in college didn't use it, and after college I started off as a CAD operator, using Tektronix SVR4 workstations with 4109 terminals running Teknicad, which is where I became quite intimate with SVR4 as I was a bit of a computer nerd ;)
fsckboy 3y ago
there's old timers and there's ye olde thymers. The big shift was the web/.com boom. In the period before the mid 90s when high end workstations were why groups of people ran unix, sysadmins were frequently more experienced systems programmers who knew a lot about the internals and why Chesterton's various fences had been built, and they did sysadmin because nobody else could be trusted. With the interwebs there became a massive need for many many servers, and an attendant need for many many sysadmins, and their training/experience would be purely administration, with more need to glean more information from guides. In that same time period, use of computers shifted to more personal computers, so the demand for datacenters was from a lot of Windows9x boxes (that needed administration and didn't get any). And then the shift to WindowsNT and then AMD64, so who was "coming up" and how much they knew of systems programming kept declining. Now we've started to adminster administration, with a lot of files in /etc that say "automatically generated, don't edit this" Evi Nemeth's books were feeding the internet growth, not the real old time sysadmin's.
JdeBP 3y ago
Zero. I've never read it to this day. Eric Foxley's Unix for Superusers, on the other hand ... Foxley's book was published in 1985. By the middle 1990s there were tonnes of books being produced, none of which was really "the bible", unless you counted ones that had "bible" in the title, like the Waite Group's "Unix System V Bible". (-:

by dmazin 3y ago

If you were an old timer, I would love to hear, how significant was Evi Nemeth's UNIX administration handbook to you? I myself learned a ton from it, but as I understand, it used to be the bible.

scarygliders 3y ago

> how significant was Evi Nemeth's UNIX administration handbook to you? Never encountered it. I presume it was available in the UK, but my Unix courses in college didn't use it, and after college I started off as a CAD operator, using Tektronix SVR4 workstations with 4109 terminals running Teknicad, which is where I became quite intimate with SVR4 as I was a bit of a computer nerd ;)

fsckboy 3y ago

there's old timers and there's ye olde thymers. The big shift was the web/.com boom. In the period before the mid 90s when high end workstations were why groups of people ran unix, sysadmins were frequently more experienced systems programmers who knew a lot about the internals and why Chesterton's various fences had been built, and they did sysadmin because nobody else could be trusted. With the interwebs there became a massive need for many many servers, and an attendant need for many many sysadmins, and their training/experience would be purely administration, with more need to glean more information from guides. In that same time period, use of computers shifted to more personal computers, so the demand for datacenters was from a lot of Windows9x boxes (that needed administration and didn't get any). And then the shift to WindowsNT and then AMD64, so who was "coming up" and how much they knew of systems programming kept declining. Now we've started to adminster administration, with a lot of files in /etc that say "automatically generated, don't edit this" Evi Nemeth's books were feeding the internet growth, not the real old time sysadmin's.

JdeBP 3y ago

Zero. I've never read it to this day. Eric Foxley's Unix for Superusers, on the other hand ... Foxley's book was published in 1985. By the middle 1990s there were tonnes of books being produced, none of which was really "the bible", unless you counted ones that had "bible" in the title, like the Waite Group's "Unix System V Bible". (-: