3 ms·
A lot of the reason that people liked unix was not that it was "better" than it's minicomputer operating system peers but that it embraced simple and holistic i
by somat 3y ago
A lot of the reason that people liked unix was not that it was "better" than it's minicomputer operating system peers but that it embraced simple and holistic interfaces. it is easy to learn and fun to use. It is a hackers os. But robust... Not exactly. My favorite quote which describes the unix viewpoint perfectly is.
"We went to lunch afterward, and I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic(), and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'"
https://multicians.org/unix.html https://multicians.org/unix.html
footnote: Really the real reason unix was popular was that it was available. AT&T was banned from the operating system business. so it was very easy to get a copy(with source). Many university computer departments did just this. and all those newfangled CS students started hacking on and graduated familiar with the system and brought it to industry with them.