19 ms·

The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

141 points by _chu1 3y ago

bioneuralnet 3y ago
Always a good read, but it needs an update with modern cultural references. Even I, nearly middle aged, have very little idea what it means to compare X.org to Iran-Contra and Regan's spending habits.
- tyingq 3y ago
  Well, and maybe some talk about Wayland.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    What’s the right modern analogy for that transition? Fukushima?
    - tyingq 3y ago
      The F-35 fighter jet program maybe.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        At least they have VR working right! Adding insult to irony, the new F-35 retrofit is reported to run a UNIX-like OS, too :p
  - bitwize 3y ago
    Ironic that one of the arguments that the Unix Haters gripe about is "X is just a protocol". Sound familiar?
- ikidd 3y ago
  Ugh. I do...
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    Just for you - SNL Reagan the "Mastermind" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5wfPlgKFh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5wfPlgKFh8
  - postmodest 3y ago
    I still have the barf-bag. Also jwz is still a salty old man.
    - sillywalk 3y ago
      Reading his posts about Netscape/Mozilla/Linux/CADT, I'm pretty sure he was a salty young man as well. Reminds me of me.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  >X Windows is the Israel-Palestine of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X Windows is to memory as Donald Trump was to money. FTFY
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    >X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats—like Sun’s Open Look clock tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn’t have enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 “xclock” utility consumes 656K to run. And X’s memory usage is increasing. The Clock Tool : C64 memory usage numbers were accurate, but I'll admit that the $5,000 toilet seat reference was a slightly gratuitous (but ultimately prescient) 781.25% exaggeration about the time when US Government under the Reagan Administration spent $37 per screw, $7,622 per coffee maker, and $640 per toilet seat (and it wasn't even made of enough gold to support Trump's vainglorious ass and ego, or even certified for the theft, storage, sale, or disposal of classified documents!), but in 2018 the Air Force paid $10,000 each for three toilet covers. But the comparison of the level of government waste of money to the level of X-Windows waste of memory has survived the test of time and is still apt. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-30-vw-18804-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-30-vw-18804-... $37 screws, a $7,622 coffee maker, $640 toilet seats; : suppliers to our military just won’t be oversold [...] Remember when we found out that the government paid $640 each for plastic toilet seats for military airplanes? Now that was something I could feel that I personally paid for. I pay a good deal more than $640 in taxes every year, and I probably paid for several of those toilet seats. That is a concrete contribution that I can be proud of. [...] https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/18/us/dept-of-hundred-dollar-toilet-seats.html https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/18/us/dept-of-hundred-dollar... Dept. of Hundred-Dollar Toilet Seats. Special to the New York Times, Feb. 18, 1986. Disclosures about the Defense Department paying hundreds of dollars for a hammer and hundreds more for a toilet seat have infuriated President Reagan, who has called the reports a ''constant drumbeat of propaganda'' and not typical of the way the Government operates. But that ''propaganda,'' the President apparently forgot or did not know, originated with a commission on governmental efficiency for which he has been full of praise, the Grace Commission. Gregg N. Lightbody, a spokesman for the commission, officially known as the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, said the group's educational arm, Citizens Against Government Waste, would continue to use the example of the costly hammer in its messages identifying faults in Government spending and procurement, even though the example might be ''an isolated instance.'' Mr. Reagan has denied the accuracy of the accounts twice in the last week and placed his faith in another panel, the President's Commission on Defense Management, to help clear up what he considers to be misconceptions about the Government. The defense management commission is expected to issue a report Feb. 28 that ''will help us in trying to make the people understand,'' Mr. Reagan said. But Herb Hetu, a spokesman for that commission, says its report will not address the hammers or the toilet seats, at least not directly. Instead, Mr. Hetu said, the statement on procurement will look at the broader issues of Defense Department organization and will recommend ways to streamline purchasing. The hammers and the toilet seats, along with coffee makers alleged to have cost thousands of dollars, Mr. Hetu said, ''are just symptoms of problems in the system.'' ''The commission didn't look at the symptoms so much as it did the larger problems,'' he said. The larger problems, he continued, are the result of years of additional regulations and well-intentioned efforts to tinker with procurement procedures without addressing them wholesale. ''It just got out of hand,'' he said. The commission's recommendations, Mr. Hetu said, will try to restructure purchasing so as to eliminate the problems that produced the symptoms. In particular, he said, the commission will suggest that the Defense Department grant more control and responsibility to lower-level managers, enabling them to investigate and prevent outrageous expenditures instead of merely passing the approval of such expenditures along to their superiors. After releasing its report Feb. 28, the commission will work on complete recommendations for a broader re-structuring of other military programs. Its final work is scheduled to be released June 30. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-air-forces-10000-toilet-cover/2018/07/14/c33d325a-85df-11e8-8f6c-46cb43e3f306_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-... The Air Force’s $10,000 toilet cover. By Aaron Gregg, July 14, 2018 at 8:57 p.m. EDT. A latrine cover for a C-5 Galaxy cargo plane used by the Air Force, designed to protect the area from corrosion. The Air Force paid a contractor $10,000 for this item on three separate occasions, most recently in 2017, before the service started using 3-D printing to make the part. (U.S. Air Force) [...] https://toilet-guru.com/trump/ https://toilet-guru.com/trump/ Donald Trump's Gold Toilets Serially bankrupt casino operator and former reality television figure Donald Trump became US President after losing the popular vote by 2.1%, 2,868,686 votes, but winning the electoral vote. So, with what the U.S. government's intelligence agencies concluded was assistance from the Russian government, Trump was President. Trump, whose father was arrested after participating in a Ku Klux Klan march, and who has a long history of racial discrimination, decorates his palace-like homes in the style of dictators Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Gold (or at least gilding), marble, and over-the-top kitsch. Trump and his third wife, Slovenian nude model Melanija Knavs, who had Germanized her name to Melania Knauss before applying for permanent residency in the U.S., moved into the White House. Earlier in 2016, the artist Maurizio Cattelan had returned from retirement with a special project at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His America (2016) replaced a toilet in one of the museum's public restrooms with a fully functional toilet cast in solid 18-carat gold. This was his first project since his 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim and planned retirement. It opened in late September, 2016, with plans to remain there indefinitely. From the museum's description of this piece: Cattelan's toilet offers a wink to the excesses of the art market, but also evokes the American dream of opportunity for all, its utility ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity. [...] Then, in September 2017, a White House spokesperson wrote to the Guggenheim Museum, asking if the Trumps could borrow Landscape With Snow, a Vincent van Gogh painting, to decorate the Presidential residence.
- stouset 3y ago
  Wouldn’t it be XFree86, back in 1994?
  - tedunangst 3y ago
    The X this book complains about would have mostly been the code/protocol overseen by the open group.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - DonHopkins 3y ago
      The Unix-Haters Handbook was published in 1994, two years before the Open Group was founded in 1996, three years before they took over the X-Window system in 1997, five years before the formation of X.org, and ten years after X-Windows was released in 1984. XFree86 was not very widely used in 1994, most people were running the original X server on non-x86 and RISC workstations at the time (Sun SPARC, SGI MIPS, DEC Microvax and Alpha, HP PA-RISC, NCD X-Terminal, etc). The Open Group had absolutely nothing to do with the design of the X11 protocol, the server implementation, or XLib. I've quite frequently written about X11, NeWS, Wayland, window management, HyperCard, web browsers, and user interface toolkits on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29097030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29097030 marcodiego on Nov 3, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (... Hi DonHopkins! Would you mind to share your opinion on Wayland with us? DonHopkins on Nov 4, 2021 [–] Thanks for asking! Hold my bong. ;) [...lots more at the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29097030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29097030 ] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502320 DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | root | parent | next [–] (An excerpt from another longer reply I just posted): From: npg@East (Neil Groundwater - Sun Consulting) Date: Wed, Jun 27, 1990 Subject: Humor from Dennis Ritchie (at USENIX) (Actually Dennis's latter remark was attributed by him to Rob Pike) from Unix Today 6/25 page 5. "..., Richie reminded the audience that Steve Jobs stood at the same podium a few years back and announced that X was brain-dead and would soon die. "He was half-right," Ritchie said. "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks." http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/133229_in-his-90-usenix-presentation-dennis-ritchie-reminded-the-audience-that-steve-jobs-stood-at-the-same-podium-a-few-years-back-and-announced-that-x-windows-was-brain-dead-and-would-soon-die.html http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/1332... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502385 DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: The X-Windows Disaster (1994) The window system needs to be displayed somehow too. What works for the window system works for the browser too. There's no need for an additional layer of widow system once you have a browser that can draw on the screen itself. A web browser can make a much better scriptable window manager / desktop environment all by itself, than anything that's possible with X-Windows. code_duck on March 6, 2020 [–] The comment I replied to said that X and Wayland were being overrun by web apps, which doesn't make any sense at all. NB as this article reminds us, there is no system called X- Windows. DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | parent [–] If you want to be pedantic, I didn't call it "X- Windows". I called it "X-Windows". Nobody ever puts a space between the "X-" and the "Windows". The title of the article we're discussing that I wrote and named uses the term "X-Windows" because I specifically told the editors of the book to spell the name that way on purpose, to annoy X fanatics. That fact was stated in the last sentence of the article. So what is there about drawing on the screen and handling input events and handling network requests that a window system can do, but a web browser can't? Why does there need to be a window system, if you already have a web browser? Does you phone have a web browser? Does it also have a window system too? How often do you open and close icons and move and resize windows around on your phone, compared to how often you browse the web on your phone? Name one thing a window system can do that a web browser can't these days. For example, is this a web browser or a window system? https://www.windows93.net/ https://www.windows93.net/ You should read up on the history of window management and alternative designs for window systems and interactive graphical user interfaces. Things weren't always the way they are now, and there are many different ways of doing things, that are a hell of a lot better than the status quo. Back before everybody blindly imitated Google and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft because they didn't know any better and never experienced anything different, there were a lot of interesting original ideas. But now everybody's into Cargo Cult programming and interface design, blindly imitating shallow surface appearances and over-reacting to the latest trendy craze (like flat design) that was an over-reaction to the previous trendy craze (like skeuomorphism), without ever looking deeper into the reasons, or god forbid scientific studies and research and user testing, or further back than a few months into the past, and never understanding why things are the way they are, or how and why they got to be that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/02/cargo-cult-user-experience-theres-an-app-for-that.php https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/02/cargo-cult-use... To illustrate my point, and lead you to enlightenment (and I don't mean the Enlightenment window manager): Here is one of Gosling's earlier papers about NeWS (originally called "SunDew"), published in 1985 at an Alvey Workshop, and the next year in an excellent Springer Verlag book called "Methodology of Window Management" that is now available online for free. [1] Chapter 5: SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System, by James Gosling [2] Another interesting chapter is Warren Teitelman's "Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View". [3] Also, the Architecture Working Group Discussion [4] and Final Report [5], and the API Task Group [6] have a treasure trove of interesting and prescient discussion between some amazing people. http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/overview.htm http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/... Methodology of Window Management F R A Hopgood, D A Duce, E V C Fielding, K Robinson, A S Williams 29 April 1985 This is the Proceedings of the Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon that took place from 29 April 1985 until 1 May 1985. It was input into the planning for the MMI part of the Alvey Programme. The Proceedings were later published by Springer-Verlag in 1986. http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/p005.htm http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/... 5. SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System James Gosling SunDew is a distributed, extensible window system that is currently being developed at SUN. It has arisen out of an effort to step back and examine various window system issues without the usual product development constraints. It should really be viewed as speculative research into the right way to build a window system. We started out by looking at a number of window systems and clients of window systems, and came up with a set of goals. From those goals, and a little bit of inspiration, we came up with a design. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22499501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22499501 sicnus on March 5, 2020 | root | parent | prev | next [–] Oh, I wanna hop in on this train. tell that fool to man X yo. ;) I've been getting pissed about people calling it "X Windows" since 1995 so there. DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | root | parent | next [–] You made my day! I'm so delighted to hear you're pissed that people call it X-Windows. ;) Thank you for letting me know my long term project of always calling it X-Windows worked perfectly as planned. I've been systematically calling it X-Windows to piss people off since June 1988, when I read the article "Things That Happen When You Say ‘X Windows’" in my copy of Volume 1 Number 2 of the June 1988 of the “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group” (which I quoted above): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501380 From the end of the X-Windows Disaster article: >Don wrote the chapter on the X-Windows Disaster. (To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501360 DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | parent | prev | next [–] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: - used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming. - used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering. - used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502125 DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | prev | next [–] Bill Joy referred to X-Windows as "Rasterop on Wheels". I gave a NeWS/Pie Menus/HyperTies/Emacs demo to Steve Jobs once, on the trade show floor at the Educom conference, right after he finally released the NeXT Machine, in November of 1988. Sun was letting me demo NeWS and the stuff we were developing at the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab on a workstation at their booth, and NeXT's booth was right across the aisle, so Ben Shneiderman rope-a-doped him and dragged him over for a demo. He jumped up and down and yelled "That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that's neat. That sucks!" I figure a 3:1 sucks:neat ratio was pretty good for him comparing something different than his newborn baby NeXT Step, which critics had taken to calling NeVR Step, since it had been vaporware for so long until then. When I tried to explain to him how flexible NeWS was, he told me "I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!" Here's Ben's account (I love how he gently put it that "Jobs had little patience with the academic side of things" -- and by "engage" he meant "jump up and down and yell"): Date: Tue, 1 Nov 88 07:55:48 EST From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu> To: hcil@tove.umd.edu Subject: steve jobs visit I just couldn't resist telling this story.... On Tuesday I was at the EDUCOM conference in DC and Steve Jobs was showing NeXT...I was quite impressed...a nice step forward, improving, refining and developing good ideas. I invited him to see our Hyperties SUN version that we were showing at the SUN booth. The gang managed to get the new NeWS version working and the Space Telescope looked great...Jobs spent about a half hour with us going from positive comments such as "Great!" to "That sucks"...he had a terrific sensitivity to the user interface issues and could articulate his reasons wonderfully. On Wednesday he came out to the lab and spent time looking at a few more of our demos...the students (and me too) were delighted to have him as a visitor. What impresses me is that he took his ideas and really put them to work... pushing back the frontier a bit further. His system really works and has much attractive in the hardware and software domains. Jobs had little patience with the academic side of things, but was very ready to engage over interface issues. Do check out NeXT...there are things to criticize, but I did come away more impressed and pleased than ready to pick at the flaws. -- Ben
- sillywalk 3y ago
  I believe the allegory (I was a kid at the time ), is that, just as Iran-Contra involved alliances of convenience between enemies and spending a lot of money, X.org (or the MIT X11 group) & all the Unix Vendors & DEC VMS, were trying to find a way to sort of standardize a Unix GUI, while also trying to siphon their competitors customers and lock them into their own proprietary systems. Maybe FAAANG, they want to eat each others users, but also not have the government interfere, especially in avoiding taxes. Here's American Dad giving a brief, basically factual < 2min, musical overview of Iran-Contra. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFV1uT-ihDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFV1uT-ihDo
- racl101 3y ago
  That sounds like a reference / joke that Dennis Miller would make.
- hulitu 3y ago
  x.org is a pale succesor of X or Xfree86. It seems that the goal of freedesktop.org is to discreditate X in order to push for wayland and systemd.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
The first time I leraned about this book I giggled about the title. But in the modern world of the conformity and a learned helplessness it's a quiet reminder what you can't do better if nobody says you unpleasant things.
- estebank 3y ago
  > But in the modern world of the conformity and a learned helplessness it's a quiet reminder what you can't do better if nobody says you unpleasant things. I fight a lot against learned helplessness, trying to get people to actually report bugs, to complain about papercuts they encounter in tools that I can change. But because people are used to having their complaints fall on deaf ears, they don't, so I seek them out in places like here and some time back, Twitter. But that also brings up a dredge of non-constructive unactionable complaints that end up doing nothing more than make me shake my head and close the tab. There are ways of complaining without being nasty to the people doing the work. Being a dick is not a personality type.
- zokier 3y ago
  > But in the modern world of the conformity and a learned helplessness it's a quiet reminder what you can't do better if nobody says you unpleasant things. But UNIX continues to dominate and have problems, so I don't see Unix-Haters Handbook being very good example of saying unpleasant things making anything better; its more of a counter-example, demonstrating how annoying rants get easily ignored
- spit2wind 3y ago
  It turns out passivity to shock is the default. Learned helplessness doesn't exist. It's less about saying unpleasant things and more about assisting others towards control. Of course, less is more, right :) https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/learnedhelplessnessat50.pdf https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/learnedhelples...
- tedunangst 3y ago
  Nothing about unix got better as a response to this book.
- 3y ago
tyingq 3y ago
The printed one included a "Unix Barf Bag" glued to the back cover. https://imgur.com/a/0fGOdP7 https://imgur.com/a/0fGOdP7
- dcminter 3y ago
  I'd forgotten that! It was a nice touch.
dcminter 3y ago
I remember borrowing this from a friend a couple of years after that Finnish chap created a *nix that I could run on my lowly 386 machine. If you are a unix lover (as I am), then it's worth it at the very least for the anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Ritchie tip-toed right up to the line between staying tongue-in-cheek and ripping them to shreds. It was quite impressive IMO.
  - kagevf 3y ago
    Felt like the hate was mutual.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    From: npg@East (Neil Groundwater - Sun Consulting) Date: Wed, Jun 27, 1990 Subject: Humor from Dennis Ritchie (at USENIX) (Actually Dennis's latter remark was attributed by him to Rob Pike) from Unix Today 6/25 page 5. "..., Richie reminded the audience that Steve Jobs stood at the same podium a few years back and announced that X was brain-dead and would soon die. "He was half-right," Ritchie said. "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks." http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/133229_in-his-90-usenix-presentation-dennis-ritchie-reminded-the-audience-that-steve-jobs-stood-at-the-same-podium-a-few-years-back-and-announced-that-x-windows-was-brain-dead-and-would-soon-die.html http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/1332...
- jakobson14 3y ago
  There's an odd dig at the FSF in there that I wish had more context. What must have it been like to watch GNU clone unix, having worked on it?
cf100clunk 3y ago
This item has a fairly even periodicity of previous submissions here at HN. I'm not quibbling about resubmissions, just wondering what is the motivation re: this particular piece? EDIT: Replies and not downvotes would be appreciated.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dcminter 3y ago
  Does it need one? There's a longish list of perennials. Mostly what they have in common is that they're interesting to first-timers and pithy enough to be worth a re-read for the rest of us. Someone comes across it for the first time, or are reminded of it, and bob's your uncle it pops up again as a submission.
  - dang 3y ago
    Yup that's right - reposts are fine after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and it's good for newer cohorts of users to get access to the perennials: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20perennials&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    - cf100clunk 3y ago
      As I say, not quibbling about resubmissions, just wondering what is the motivation regarding this particular piece and not generically.
- UncleSlacky 3y ago
  Possibly because of this mention in the comments of a recent El Reg article about Wayland: https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/11/29/rhel_10_dropping_x11/#c_4767056 https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/11/29/rhel_10_...
j2kun 3y ago
To what extent have the problems in the book been addressed since 1994?
- cf100clunk 3y ago
  Could you be more specific?
  - justin66 3y ago
    To what extent have the problems in The Unix-Haters Handbook been addressed since 1994?
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      Maybe they wanted to know which month you were taking about.
      - cf100clunk 3y ago
        In Unix time please.
- tyingq 3y ago
  The "plethora of incomplete, incompatible shells" has narrowed down a fair amount if you only include ones in wide use. And "The push for a unified Unix" sort of happened, we're down to 2 or 3 that get any broad attention.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    2 or 3? Linux, and what are the other 1 or 2?
    - tyingq 3y ago
      MacOS, and various might argue Minix (prevalence via Intel Management Engine), or FreeBSD (still very important for a few big companies), etc.
LAC-Tech 3y ago
It's so strange that as far back as the 80s a lot of the criticism of unix is that it wasn't "graphical". Meanwhile in the year 2023 AD I've moved more and more of my workflow to the terminal to escape the rapidly changing, distracting, and visually bloated GUI landscape.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  If it is in the terminal (command line to be specific since GUI is possible inside a terminal too) then it is already ready for automation, containerisation, running on a server.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 3y ago
  As someone that was alive during those UNIX days, I really don't get the appeal to live in the past.
  - LAC-Tech 3y ago
    I just gave you multiple reasons.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Which is why I started as making the point I lived through it, when fancy graphics weren't even an option.
  - ploum 3y ago
    I don’t believe it is "the past" which is appealing. We live in a very graphical society, with (moving) pictures everywhere, all the time. But to "think", you need words. As Neal Stephenson put it in "In the beginning was the command line", Words are the only technology available to encode thoughts. While images and sounds convey more emotions. It’s not a coincidence that we are here exchanging words. Command-line, is a way to exchange words with a computer. It is way more precise, more efficient. But it takes learning and thinking. It’s harder the same way it is harder to read a book than to watch a movie. Especially if you never learned to read in the first place which, for the command-line, is approximately everyone but a few geeks. If your goal is to "think" precisely and convey this thinking into something tangible on a computer, then you probably want the command line. But, as it needs a lot of learning, you don’t want it for temporary job. You don’t learn to read because you want to read Harry Potter. You learn to read because you want to spend your life reading books. In "UNIX As Litterature", Scoville argued that UNIX is done by literary people for literary people. People which have a strong "book" culture. People who probably enjoy books more than the movies because "there’s a lot more, it’s more subtle, I can imagine it like I want". Those people, (disclaimer: I count myself in those) may even have too much "graphics" in their daily lives. Too many pictures. Billboards, movies, ads, colored and graphical t-shirts everywhere, branding. Retreating to the command-line feels good, calm, zen. (see Stephenson book again). But, I admit, those people are a minority. Graphical interfaces have the advantage of being intuitive. Intuitive literally means "you don’t need to think" (that’s what intuition is). You click randomly and, by trial and error, you learn some arbitrary rules that the designers decided to use. (when I was teaching basic Windows XP computer use to elders, I once got a very simple question: "how do I know if I need to click once or double click?". I never could answer that. There are no real rule. You learn it and never think about it afterward). So the GUI is really about removing the thinking from the process. Which is good when you don’t care about the process or when you are not really sure what you want. Or when you want something to be quickly done once and for all. Command-line forces you to clarify your thoughts all the time. It is hard. It is energy consuming. But this forces you to take real decisions.
bradford 3y ago
As someone who picked up C++ in the late 90s, the discussion on the language resonates with me: "Other books can tell you how using any of dozens of object-oriented languages can make programmers more productive, make code more robust, and reduce maintenance costs. Don’t expect to see any of these advantages in C++..." "That’s because C++ misses the point of what being object-oriented was all about. Instead of simplifying things, C++ sets a new world record for complexity. Like Unix, C++ was never designed, it mutated as one goofy mistake after another became obvious. It’s just one big mess of afterthoughts. There is no grammar specifying the language (something practically all other languages have), so you can’t even tell when a given line of code is legitimate or not."
- pjmlp 3y ago
  C++ was born into UNIX, on the same corridor as UNIX and C folks were, hence why its adoption grew alongside UNIX and C. I suggest reading Design and Evolution of C++.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    no. c++'s growth was large projects building largescale apps on MSWindows (Microsoft Office et al), and that started just before "the internet/web". unix grew in somewhat coincidentally the same timeframe, and the timeframe that the internet did because tcp/ip/servers/linux/everything's a stream; client-server was "the thing" and that gave http a place to stand. unix and C are inextricably bound, and that gives C++ some free apron strings to tug, but C++ has never really associated itself with *nix per se. (MS window handles providing a cute place to put a link to the C++ class really cemented it as a "natural" way to interface to C++ OOP for handling UI events)
    - anthk 3y ago
      This. Unix/Linux are bound to C. Unix's API it's just libc. NT Objects and C++ was the natural binding as you say. Even ReactOS has an NT object viewer in their explorer.exe/shel32.dll reimplementation.
    - 3y ago
idkdotcom 3y ago
Say what you will, but I started my professional career with computers back in 1998 doing professional services for HP and its variant of UNIX, HP-UX, and I haven't looked back. As I kid I had played around with a number of personal computers that ran either MS-DOS, Windows or proprietary OS'es (such as the AmigaDOS). To this day, I consider UNIX-Like systems to be a delight. Even Apple had to move to UNIX. Big Tech would not exist without Linux (aka UNIX).
dang 3y ago
Related. Others? The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417690 - May 2022 (86 comments) The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 - March 2019 (157 comments) The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614992 - July 2018 (1 comment) The Unix-HATERS Handbook [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15403642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15403642 - Oct 2017 (2 comments) The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815 - March 2017 (307 comments) The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976694 - July 2015 (5 comments) The Unix Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726115 - May 2014 (50 comments) Anti-foreword to the Unix haters handbook by dmr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3106271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3106271 - Oct 2011 (31 comments) The Unix Haters Handbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272975 - April 2010 (28 comments) The Unix Hater’s Handbook, Reconsidered - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319773 - Sept 2008 (5 comments)
anotheraccount9 3y ago
I can't wait for an AI/OS to simply ask it what I need to do.
Merrill 3y ago
Fairly early, Bell Labs executives decided to mandate that Bell Labs organizations developing software for the Bell System use Unix, which was from the research organization. This led to many inventive rationales as to why a non-DEC computer and a non-Unix OS where really essential for specific applications. Resistance lasted for some time, but was eventually futile.
wbadart 3y ago
I knew of Don Norman from reading The Design of Everyday Things a few years ago; funny to see his name pop up here! Searching around to make sure it's the same Norman, I came to find out that he wrote an article, The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid, 7 years before DoET came out (which is confirmed in the Forward)! Had no idea he was on this scene.
eigenhombre 3y ago
The "Illustrations" credit on the cover is covered up by the "Programmers Press" but it looks like it is John Klossner. The hand-drawn illustrations are great, definitely one of my favorite aspects of the book.
- tyingq 3y ago
  You can click-drag-copy it in at least some pdf renderers. "Illustrations by John Klossner"
simonblack 3y ago
It's ironic that this 30-year-old book, that was produced at a time when UNIX was not the colossus that it and related OSs are today, has been superseded by the course of events. (Same as BYTE Magazine's 1995 cover story "Is UNIX Dead?" presaged its own death by only a few years.) Today, most computers (and phones, TVs, and household appliances also) run on UNIX or a related OS, while the Vaxes of 1994 have disappeared and the Windows Desktop is declining rapidly away. Author's Note: I have never used Windows as my 'daily driver'. I have used a UNIX Desktop throughout the 1990s, and a Linux Desktop since 2001.
- kgwgk 3y ago
  Worse is better.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  I'm not sure about that. The Unixes that the book complains about have been completely out to pasture for a couple of decades. NeXT existed at the time and was specifically excluded.
  - cafard 3y ago
    There's a snotty remark about Mach somewhere in there--does that count?
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    You know, your PDF reader probably has a search function, and the book itself has an index, which has numerous references to NeXT and NeXTSTEP. NeXT: 11, 14, 230, 296 NEXTSTEP: 11, 14, 54, 141 OpenStep: 14, 141 Page xxxi of The Unix-Haters Handbook mentions: "In fact, it was typeset using FrameMaker on a Macintosh, a Windows box, and a NeXTstation." (Affectionately called "PainMaker" by its victims.) I wrote three long paragraphs about NeXTSTEP (however you choose to spell and capitalize it), comparing it to NeWS and Display PostScript, in the X-Windows chapter. I even gave Steve Jobs a NeWS demo and a "NeRD" button at EduCOM, the month NeXTSTEP was finally released in November of 1988 (until then it was considered vaporware, and derisively called "NeVRSTEP" -- the critics even made t-shirts): >I gave a NeWS/Pie Menus/HyperTies/Emacs demo to Steve Jobs once, on the trade show floor at the Educom conference, right after he finally released the NeXT Machine, in November of 1988. >Sun was letting me demo NeWS and the stuff we were developing at the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab on a workstation at their booth, and NeXT's booth was right across the aisle, so Ben Shneiderman rope-a-doped him and dragged him over for a demo. He jumped up and down and yelled "That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that's neat. That sucks!" >I figure a 3:1 sucks:neat ratio was pretty good for him comparing something different than his newborn baby NeXT Step, which critics had taken to calling NeVR Step, since it had been vaporware for so long until then. >When I tried to explain to him how flexible NeWS was, he told me "I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!" And one of the editors, Simson Garfinkel <simsong@nextworld.com>, wrote a popular book about NeXTSTEP and was a senior editor at NeXTWORLD magazine. p. 11: Date: Wed, 20 Nov 91 09:37:23 PST From: simsong@nextworld.com To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: Unix names Perhaps keeping track of the different names for various versions of Unix is not a problem for most people, but today the copy editor here Standardizing Unconformity 11 at NeXTWORLD asked me what the difference was between AIX and A/UX. “AIX is Unix from IBM. A/UX is Unix from Apple.” “What’s the difference?” he asked. “I’m not sure. They’re both AT&T System V with gratuitous changes. Then there’s HP-UX which is HP’s version of System V with gratuitous changes. DEC calls its system ULTRIX. DGUX is Data General’s. And don’t forget Xenix—that’s from SCO.” NeXT, meanwhile, calls their version of Unix (which is really Mach with brain-dead Unix wrapped around it) NEXTSTEP. But it’s impossible to get a definition of NEXTSTEP: is it the window system? Objective-C? The environment? Mach? What? p. 13 (although the index says 14: blame PainMaker, which is riddled with features!): Sun Microsystems recently announced that it was joining with NeXT to promulgate OpenStep, a new standard for object-oriented user interfaces. To achieve this openness, Sun would will wrap C++ and DOE around Objective-C and NEXTSTEP. Can’t decide which standard you want to follow? No problem: now you can follow them all. p. 53 (although the index says 54, thanks PainMaker): Hmm… Excuse us for one second: % ls /lib cpp* gcrt0.o libsys_s.a cpp-precomp* i386/ m68k/ crt0.o libsys_p.a posixcrt0.o next% strings /lib/cpp-precomp | grep / /*%s*/ //%s /usr/local/include /NextDeveloper/Headers /NextDeveloper/Headers/ansi /NextDeveloper/Headers/bsd /LocalDeveloper/Headers /LocalDeveloper/Headers/ansi /LocalDeveloper/Headers/bsd /NextDeveloper/2.0CompatibleHeaders %s/%s /lib/%s/specs next% Silly us. NEXTSTEP’s /lib/cpp calls /lib/cpp-precomp. You won’t find that documented on the man page either: next% man cpp-precomp No manual entry for cpp-precomp. p. 140 (FrameMaker's index says 141): X Graphics: Square Peg in a Round Hole "Programming X Windows is like trying to find the square root of pi using roman numerals." —Unknown The PostScript imaging model, used by NeWS and Display PostScript, solves all these horrible problems in a high-level, standard, device independent manner. NeWS has integrated extensions for input, lightweight processes, networking, and windows. It can draw and respond to input in the same arbitrary coordinate system and define window shapes with PostScript paths. The Display PostScript extension for X is intended for output only and doesn’t address any window system issues, which must be dealt with through X. NEXTSTEP is a toolkit written in Objective-C, on top of NeXT’s own window server. NEXTSTEP uses Display PostScript for imaging, but not for input. It has an excellent imaging model and well designed toolkit, but the Display PostScript server is not designed to be programmed with interactive code: instead all events are sent to the client for processing, and the toolkit runs in the client, so it does not have the low bandwidth, context-switching, and code-sharing advantages of NeWS. Nevertheless, it is still superior to X, which lacks the device-independent imaging model. On the other hand, X’s spelling has remained constant over the years, while NeXT has at various times spelled their flagship product “NextStep,” “NeXTstep,” “NeXTStep,” “NeXTSTEP,” “NEXTSTEP,” and finally “OpenStep.” A standardized, consistent spelling is certainly easier on the marketing ’droids. Unfortunately, NeWS and NEXTSTEP were political failures because they suffer from the same two problems: oBNoXiOuS capitalization, and Amiga Persecution Attitude[TM]. p. 230 (hey FrameMaker got one right!!!): Footnote 2: Indeed, there are so many problems with partitioning in Unix that at least one vendor (NeXT, Inc.) recommends that disks be equipped with only a single partition. This is probably because NeXT’s Mach kernel can swap to the Unix file system, rather than requiring a special preallocated space on the system’s hard disk. p. 295 (FrameMaker guessed 296, two out of six ain't bad): Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1991 02:16:03 GMT From: meuer@roch.geom.umn.edu (Mark V. Meuer) Organization: Minnesota Supercomputer Institute Subject: Re: File find delay within Emacs on a NeXT To: help-gnu-emacs@prep.ai.mit.edu In article <1991Sep16.231808.9812@s1.msi.umn.edu> meuer@roch.geom.umn.edu (Mark V. Meuer) writes: I have a NeXT with version 2.1 of the system. We have Emacs 18.55 running. (Please don’t tell me to upgrade to version 18.57 unless you can also supply a pointer to diffs or at least s- and m- files for the NeXT.) There are several machines in our network and we are using yellow pages. The problem is that whenever I try to find a file (either through “C-x C-f”, “emacs file” or through a client talking to the server) Emacs freezes completely for between 15 and 30 seconds. The file then loads and everything works fine. In about 1 in 10 times the file loads immediately with no delay at all. Several people sent me suggestions (thank you!), but the obnoxious delay was finally explained and corrected by Scott Bertilson, one of the really smart people who works here at the Center. For people who have had this problem, one quick hack to correct it is to make /usr/lib/emacs/lock be a symbolic link to /tmp. The full explanation follows. I was able to track down that there was a file called !!!SuperLock!!! in /usr/lib/emacs/lock, and when that file existed the delay would occur. When that file wasn’t there, neither was the delay (usually). We found the segment of code that was causing the problem. When Emacs tries to open a file to edit, it tries to do an exclusive create on the superlock file. If the exclusive create fails, it tries 19 more times with a one second delay between each try. After 20 tries it just ignores the lock file being there and opens the file the user wanted. If it succeeds in creating the lock file, it opens the user’s file and then immediately removes the lock file. The problem we had was that /usr/lib/emacs/lock was mounted over NFS, and apparently NFS doesn’t handle exclusive create as well as one would hope. The command would create the file, but return an error saying it didn’t. Since Emacs thinks it wasn't able to create the lock file, it never removes it. But since it did create the file, all future attempts to open files encounter this lock file and force Emacs to go through a 20-second loop before proceeding. That was what was causing the delay. The hack we used to cure this problem was to make /usr/lib/emacs/lock be a symbolic link to /tmp, so that it would always point to a local directory and avoid the NFS exclusive create bug. I know this is far from perfect, but so far it is working correctly. Thanks to everyone who responded to my plea for help. It’s nice to know that there are so many friendly people on the net.
justinzollars 3y ago
This is pretty awesome (page 75): % rm meese-ethics rm: meese-ethics nonexistent % ar m God ar: God does not exist % "How would you rate Dan Quayle's incompetence? Unmatched ". % ^How did the sex change^ operation go? Modifier failed. % If I had a ( for every $ the Congress spent, what would I have? Too many ('s. % make love Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop. % sleep with me bad character % got a light? No match. % man: why did you get a divorce? man:: Too many arguments. % ^What is saccharine? Bad substitute. %blow %blow: No such job.
- rcarmo 3y ago
  We have a tongue-in-cheek one in Portuguese: % man teiga # butter No manual entry for teiga
mtraven 3y ago
I founded the original unix-haters list that the book is based off of. What I say these days: Unix went from the worst operating system around, to the best, without getting appreciably better. Not entirely true. But the Unix model of computation has obviously won. The Lisp Machine model, well, nobody even understands what that means any more.
- adestefan 3y ago
  Just because it's the least bad doesn't mean anyone won.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- jhbadger 3y ago
  Well, if we want to, we can use Open Genera to emulate a Symbolics workstation -- on Unix.
- metroholografix 3y ago
  The Lisp Machine model is represented by Emacs these days (which still has a thriving community). It makes interacting with the Unix model bearable since it can subsume it. If that wasn't possible and I had to make do with just Unix, I would have switched professions. There's only so much bullshit one can take.
- DannyBee 3y ago
  The list was great. I have the two partial archives that were once posted. Are there any real archives around? I know one of the concerns was redacting names (even with just initials and no mail paths it is obvious who most people are)
- tptacek 3y ago
  That's a very good quip. Is it yours? Do I credit you for it?
rcarmo 3y ago
I love this. I still keep a copy on my iPhone/iPad for when I want to remember those days.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Where is the Windows-Haters Handbook.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > Where is the Windows-Haters Handbook. On help.microsoft.com.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
Oh for a time when haters had self-awareness and humor.

141 points by _chu1 3y ago

Always a good read, but it needs an update with modern cultural references. Even I, nearly middle aged, have very little idea what it means to compare X.org to Iran-Contra and Regan's spending habits.

tyingq 3y ago
Well, and maybe some talk about Wayland.
- civilitty 3y ago
  What’s the right modern analogy for that transition? Fukushima?
  - tyingq 3y ago
    The F-35 fighter jet program maybe.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      At least they have VR working right! Adding insult to irony, the new F-35 retrofit is reported to run a UNIX-like OS, too :p
- bitwize 3y ago
  Ironic that one of the arguments that the Unix Haters gripe about is "X is just a protocol". Sound familiar?
ikidd 3y ago
Ugh. I do...
- sillywalk 3y ago
  Just for you - SNL Reagan the "Mastermind" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5wfPlgKFh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5wfPlgKFh8
- postmodest 3y ago
  I still have the barf-bag. Also jwz is still a salty old man.
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    Reading his posts about Netscape/Mozilla/Linux/CADT, I'm pretty sure he was a salty young man as well. Reminds me of me.
kmeisthax 3y ago
>X Windows is the Israel-Palestine of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X Windows is to memory as Donald Trump was to money. FTFY
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  >X has had its share of $5,000 toilet seats—like Sun’s Open Look clock tool, which gobbles up 1.4 megabytes of real memory! If you sacrificed all the RAM from 22 Commodore 64s to clock tool, it still wouldn’t have enough to tell you the time. Even the vanilla X11R4 “xclock” utility consumes 656K to run. And X’s memory usage is increasing. The Clock Tool : C64 memory usage numbers were accurate, but I'll admit that the $5,000 toilet seat reference was a slightly gratuitous (but ultimately prescient) 781.25% exaggeration about the time when US Government under the Reagan Administration spent $37 per screw, $7,622 per coffee maker, and $640 per toilet seat (and it wasn't even made of enough gold to support Trump's vainglorious ass and ego, or even certified for the theft, storage, sale, or disposal of classified documents!), but in 2018 the Air Force paid $10,000 each for three toilet covers. But the comparison of the level of government waste of money to the level of X-Windows waste of memory has survived the test of time and is still apt. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-30-vw-18804-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-30-vw-18804-... $37 screws, a $7,622 coffee maker, $640 toilet seats; : suppliers to our military just won’t be oversold [...] Remember when we found out that the government paid $640 each for plastic toilet seats for military airplanes? Now that was something I could feel that I personally paid for. I pay a good deal more than $640 in taxes every year, and I probably paid for several of those toilet seats. That is a concrete contribution that I can be proud of. [...] https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/18/us/dept-of-hundred-dollar-toilet-seats.html https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/18/us/dept-of-hundred-dollar... Dept. of Hundred-Dollar Toilet Seats. Special to the New York Times, Feb. 18, 1986. Disclosures about the Defense Department paying hundreds of dollars for a hammer and hundreds more for a toilet seat have infuriated President Reagan, who has called the reports a ''constant drumbeat of propaganda'' and not typical of the way the Government operates. But that ''propaganda,'' the President apparently forgot or did not know, originated with a commission on governmental efficiency for which he has been full of praise, the Grace Commission. Gregg N. Lightbody, a spokesman for the commission, officially known as the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, said the group's educational arm, Citizens Against Government Waste, would continue to use the example of the costly hammer in its messages identifying faults in Government spending and procurement, even though the example might be ''an isolated instance.'' Mr. Reagan has denied the accuracy of the accounts twice in the last week and placed his faith in another panel, the President's Commission on Defense Management, to help clear up what he considers to be misconceptions about the Government. The defense management commission is expected to issue a report Feb. 28 that ''will help us in trying to make the people understand,'' Mr. Reagan said. But Herb Hetu, a spokesman for that commission, says its report will not address the hammers or the toilet seats, at least not directly. Instead, Mr. Hetu said, the statement on procurement will look at the broader issues of Defense Department organization and will recommend ways to streamline purchasing. The hammers and the toilet seats, along with coffee makers alleged to have cost thousands of dollars, Mr. Hetu said, ''are just symptoms of problems in the system.'' ''The commission didn't look at the symptoms so much as it did the larger problems,'' he said. The larger problems, he continued, are the result of years of additional regulations and well-intentioned efforts to tinker with procurement procedures without addressing them wholesale. ''It just got out of hand,'' he said. The commission's recommendations, Mr. Hetu said, will try to restructure purchasing so as to eliminate the problems that produced the symptoms. In particular, he said, the commission will suggest that the Defense Department grant more control and responsibility to lower-level managers, enabling them to investigate and prevent outrageous expenditures instead of merely passing the approval of such expenditures along to their superiors. After releasing its report Feb. 28, the commission will work on complete recommendations for a broader re-structuring of other military programs. Its final work is scheduled to be released June 30. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-air-forces-10000-toilet-cover/2018/07/14/c33d325a-85df-11e8-8f6c-46cb43e3f306_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-... The Air Force’s $10,000 toilet cover. By Aaron Gregg, July 14, 2018 at 8:57 p.m. EDT. A latrine cover for a C-5 Galaxy cargo plane used by the Air Force, designed to protect the area from corrosion. The Air Force paid a contractor $10,000 for this item on three separate occasions, most recently in 2017, before the service started using 3-D printing to make the part. (U.S. Air Force) [...] https://toilet-guru.com/trump/ https://toilet-guru.com/trump/ Donald Trump's Gold Toilets Serially bankrupt casino operator and former reality television figure Donald Trump became US President after losing the popular vote by 2.1%, 2,868,686 votes, but winning the electoral vote. So, with what the U.S. government's intelligence agencies concluded was assistance from the Russian government, Trump was President. Trump, whose father was arrested after participating in a Ku Klux Klan march, and who has a long history of racial discrimination, decorates his palace-like homes in the style of dictators Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Gold (or at least gilding), marble, and over-the-top kitsch. Trump and his third wife, Slovenian nude model Melanija Knavs, who had Germanized her name to Melania Knauss before applying for permanent residency in the U.S., moved into the White House. Earlier in 2016, the artist Maurizio Cattelan had returned from retirement with a special project at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His America (2016) replaced a toilet in one of the museum's public restrooms with a fully functional toilet cast in solid 18-carat gold. This was his first project since his 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim and planned retirement. It opened in late September, 2016, with plans to remain there indefinitely. From the museum's description of this piece: Cattelan's toilet offers a wink to the excesses of the art market, but also evokes the American dream of opportunity for all, its utility ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity. [...] Then, in September 2017, a White House spokesperson wrote to the Guggenheim Museum, asking if the Trumps could borrow Landscape With Snow, a Vincent van Gogh painting, to decorate the Presidential residence.
stouset 3y ago
Wouldn’t it be XFree86, back in 1994?
- tedunangst 3y ago
  The X this book complains about would have mostly been the code/protocol overseen by the open group.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    The Unix-Haters Handbook was published in 1994, two years before the Open Group was founded in 1996, three years before they took over the X-Window system in 1997, five years before the formation of X.org, and ten years after X-Windows was released in 1984. XFree86 was not very widely used in 1994, most people were running the original X server on non-x86 and RISC workstations at the time (Sun SPARC, SGI MIPS, DEC Microvax and Alpha, HP PA-RISC, NCD X-Terminal, etc). The Open Group had absolutely nothing to do with the design of the X11 protocol, the server implementation, or XLib. I've quite frequently written about X11, NeWS, Wayland, window management, HyperCard, web browsers, and user interface toolkits on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29097030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29097030 marcodiego on Nov 3, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (... Hi DonHopkins! Would you mind to share your opinion on Wayland with us? DonHopkins on Nov 4, 2021 [–] Thanks for asking! Hold my bong. ;) [...lots more at the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29097030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29097030 ] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502320 DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | root | parent | next [–] (An excerpt from another longer reply I just posted): From: npg@East (Neil Groundwater - Sun Consulting) Date: Wed, Jun 27, 1990 Subject: Humor from Dennis Ritchie (at USENIX) (Actually Dennis's latter remark was attributed by him to Rob Pike) from Unix Today 6/25 page 5. "..., Richie reminded the audience that Steve Jobs stood at the same podium a few years back and announced that X was brain-dead and would soon die. "He was half-right," Ritchie said. "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks." http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/133229_in-his-90-usenix-presentation-dennis-ritchie-reminded-the-audience-that-steve-jobs-stood-at-the-same-podium-a-few-years-back-and-announced-that-x-windows-was-brain-dead-and-would-soon-die.html http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/1332... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502385 DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: The X-Windows Disaster (1994) The window system needs to be displayed somehow too. What works for the window system works for the browser too. There's no need for an additional layer of widow system once you have a browser that can draw on the screen itself. A web browser can make a much better scriptable window manager / desktop environment all by itself, than anything that's possible with X-Windows. code_duck on March 6, 2020 [–] The comment I replied to said that X and Wayland were being overrun by web apps, which doesn't make any sense at all. NB as this article reminds us, there is no system called X- Windows. DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | parent [–] If you want to be pedantic, I didn't call it "X- Windows". I called it "X-Windows". Nobody ever puts a space between the "X-" and the "Windows". The title of the article we're discussing that I wrote and named uses the term "X-Windows" because I specifically told the editors of the book to spell the name that way on purpose, to annoy X fanatics. That fact was stated in the last sentence of the article. So what is there about drawing on the screen and handling input events and handling network requests that a window system can do, but a web browser can't? Why does there need to be a window system, if you already have a web browser? Does you phone have a web browser? Does it also have a window system too? How often do you open and close icons and move and resize windows around on your phone, compared to how often you browse the web on your phone? Name one thing a window system can do that a web browser can't these days. For example, is this a web browser or a window system? https://www.windows93.net/ https://www.windows93.net/ You should read up on the history of window management and alternative designs for window systems and interactive graphical user interfaces. Things weren't always the way they are now, and there are many different ways of doing things, that are a hell of a lot better than the status quo. Back before everybody blindly imitated Google and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft because they didn't know any better and never experienced anything different, there were a lot of interesting original ideas. But now everybody's into Cargo Cult programming and interface design, blindly imitating shallow surface appearances and over-reacting to the latest trendy craze (like flat design) that was an over-reaction to the previous trendy craze (like skeuomorphism), without ever looking deeper into the reasons, or god forbid scientific studies and research and user testing, or further back than a few months into the past, and never understanding why things are the way they are, or how and why they got to be that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/02/cargo-cult-user-experience-theres-an-app-for-that.php https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2012/02/cargo-cult-use... To illustrate my point, and lead you to enlightenment (and I don't mean the Enlightenment window manager): Here is one of Gosling's earlier papers about NeWS (originally called "SunDew"), published in 1985 at an Alvey Workshop, and the next year in an excellent Springer Verlag book called "Methodology of Window Management" that is now available online for free. [1] Chapter 5: SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System, by James Gosling [2] Another interesting chapter is Warren Teitelman's "Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View". [3] Also, the Architecture Working Group Discussion [4] and Final Report [5], and the API Task Group [6] have a treasure trove of interesting and prescient discussion between some amazing people. http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/overview.htm http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/... Methodology of Window Management F R A Hopgood, D A Duce, E V C Fielding, K Robinson, A S Williams 29 April 1985 This is the Proceedings of the Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon that took place from 29 April 1985 until 1 May 1985. It was input into the planning for the MMI part of the Alvey Programme. The Proceedings were later published by Springer-Verlag in 1986. http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/p005.htm http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/... 5. SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System James Gosling SunDew is a distributed, extensible window system that is currently being developed at SUN. It has arisen out of an effort to step back and examine various window system issues without the usual product development constraints. It should really be viewed as speculative research into the right way to build a window system. We started out by looking at a number of window systems and clients of window systems, and came up with a set of goals. From those goals, and a little bit of inspiration, we came up with a design. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22499501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22499501 sicnus on March 5, 2020 | root | parent | prev | next [–] Oh, I wanna hop in on this train. tell that fool to man X yo. ;) I've been getting pissed about people calling it "X Windows" since 1995 so there. DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | root | parent | next [–] You made my day! I'm so delighted to hear you're pissed that people call it X-Windows. ;) Thank you for letting me know my long term project of always calling it X-Windows worked perfectly as planned. I've been systematically calling it X-Windows to piss people off since June 1988, when I read the article "Things That Happen When You Say ‘X Windows’" in my copy of Volume 1 Number 2 of the June 1988 of the “XNextEvent” newsletter, “The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User’s Group” (which I quoted above): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501380 From the end of the X-Windows Disaster article: >Don wrote the chapter on the X-Windows Disaster. (To annoy X fanatics, Don specifically asked that we include the hyphen after the letter "X,", as well as the plural of the word "Windows," in his chapter title. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501360 DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | parent | prev | next [–] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: - used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming. - used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering. - used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502125 DonHopkins on March 6, 2020 | prev | next [–] Bill Joy referred to X-Windows as "Rasterop on Wheels". I gave a NeWS/Pie Menus/HyperTies/Emacs demo to Steve Jobs once, on the trade show floor at the Educom conference, right after he finally released the NeXT Machine, in November of 1988. Sun was letting me demo NeWS and the stuff we were developing at the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab on a workstation at their booth, and NeXT's booth was right across the aisle, so Ben Shneiderman rope-a-doped him and dragged him over for a demo. He jumped up and down and yelled "That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that's neat. That sucks!" I figure a 3:1 sucks:neat ratio was pretty good for him comparing something different than his newborn baby NeXT Step, which critics had taken to calling NeVR Step, since it had been vaporware for so long until then. When I tried to explain to him how flexible NeWS was, he told me "I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!" Here's Ben's account (I love how he gently put it that "Jobs had little patience with the academic side of things" -- and by "engage" he meant "jump up and down and yell"): Date: Tue, 1 Nov 88 07:55:48 EST From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu> To: hcil@tove.umd.edu Subject: steve jobs visit I just couldn't resist telling this story.... On Tuesday I was at the EDUCOM conference in DC and Steve Jobs was showing NeXT...I was quite impressed...a nice step forward, improving, refining and developing good ideas. I invited him to see our Hyperties SUN version that we were showing at the SUN booth. The gang managed to get the new NeWS version working and the Space Telescope looked great...Jobs spent about a half hour with us going from positive comments such as "Great!" to "That sucks"...he had a terrific sensitivity to the user interface issues and could articulate his reasons wonderfully. On Wednesday he came out to the lab and spent time looking at a few more of our demos...the students (and me too) were delighted to have him as a visitor. What impresses me is that he took his ideas and really put them to work... pushing back the frontier a bit further. His system really works and has much attractive in the hardware and software domains. Jobs had little patience with the academic side of things, but was very ready to engage over interface issues. Do check out NeXT...there are things to criticize, but I did come away more impressed and pleased than ready to pick at the flaws. -- Ben
sillywalk 3y ago
I believe the allegory (I was a kid at the time ), is that, just as Iran-Contra involved alliances of convenience between enemies and spending a lot of money, X.org (or the MIT X11 group) & all the Unix Vendors & DEC VMS, were trying to find a way to sort of standardize a Unix GUI, while also trying to siphon their competitors customers and lock them into their own proprietary systems. Maybe FAAANG, they want to eat each others users, but also not have the government interfere, especially in avoiding taxes. Here's American Dad giving a brief, basically factual < 2min, musical overview of Iran-Contra. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFV1uT-ihDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFV1uT-ihDo
racl101 3y ago
That sounds like a reference / joke that Dennis Miller would make.
hulitu 3y ago
x.org is a pale succesor of X or Xfree86. It seems that the goal of freedesktop.org is to discreditate X in order to push for wayland and systemd.

justsomehnguy 3y ago

The first time I leraned about this book I giggled about the title. But in the modern world of the conformity and a learned helplessness it's a quiet reminder what you can't do better if nobody says you unpleasant things.

estebank 3y ago
> But in the modern world of the conformity and a learned helplessness it's a quiet reminder what you can't do better if nobody says you unpleasant things. I fight a lot against learned helplessness, trying to get people to actually report bugs, to complain about papercuts they encounter in tools that I can change. But because people are used to having their complaints fall on deaf ears, they don't, so I seek them out in places like here and some time back, Twitter. But that also brings up a dredge of non-constructive unactionable complaints that end up doing nothing more than make me shake my head and close the tab. There are ways of complaining without being nasty to the people doing the work. Being a dick is not a personality type.
zokier 3y ago
> But in the modern world of the conformity and a learned helplessness it's a quiet reminder what you can't do better if nobody says you unpleasant things. But UNIX continues to dominate and have problems, so I don't see Unix-Haters Handbook being very good example of saying unpleasant things making anything better; its more of a counter-example, demonstrating how annoying rants get easily ignored
spit2wind 3y ago
It turns out passivity to shock is the default. Learned helplessness doesn't exist. It's less about saying unpleasant things and more about assisting others towards control. Of course, less is more, right :) https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/learnedhelplessnessat50.pdf https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/learnedhelples...
tedunangst 3y ago
Nothing about unix got better as a response to this book.
3y ago

tyingq 3y ago

The printed one included a "Unix Barf Bag" glued to the back cover. https://imgur.com/a/0fGOdP7 https://imgur.com/a/0fGOdP7

dcminter 3y ago
I'd forgotten that! It was a nice touch.

dcminter 3y ago

I remember borrowing this from a friend a couple of years after that Finnish chap created a *nix that I could run on my lowly 386 machine. If you are a unix lover (as I am), then it's worth it at the very least for the anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie.

bee_rider 3y ago
Ritchie tip-toed right up to the line between staying tongue-in-cheek and ripping them to shreds. It was quite impressive IMO.
- kagevf 3y ago
  Felt like the hate was mutual.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  From: npg@East (Neil Groundwater - Sun Consulting) Date: Wed, Jun 27, 1990 Subject: Humor from Dennis Ritchie (at USENIX) (Actually Dennis's latter remark was attributed by him to Rob Pike) from Unix Today 6/25 page 5. "..., Richie reminded the audience that Steve Jobs stood at the same podium a few years back and announced that X was brain-dead and would soon die. "He was half-right," Ritchie said. "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks." http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/133229_in-his-90-usenix-presentation-dennis-ritchie-reminded-the-audience-that-steve-jobs-stood-at-the-same-podium-a-few-years-back-and-announced-that-x-windows-was-brain-dead-and-would-soon-die.html http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/1332...
jakobson14 3y ago
There's an odd dig at the FSF in there that I wish had more context. What must have it been like to watch GNU clone unix, having worked on it?

cf100clunk 3y ago

This item has a fairly even periodicity of previous submissions here at HN. I'm not quibbling about resubmissions, just wondering what is the motivation re: this particular piece? EDIT: Replies and not downvotes would be appreciated.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dcminter 3y ago
Does it need one? There's a longish list of perennials. Mostly what they have in common is that they're interesting to first-timers and pithy enough to be worth a re-read for the rest of us. Someone comes across it for the first time, or are reminded of it, and bob's your uncle it pops up again as a submission.
- dang 3y ago
  Yup that's right - reposts are fine after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and it's good for newer cohorts of users to get access to the perennials: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20perennials&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - cf100clunk 3y ago
    As I say, not quibbling about resubmissions, just wondering what is the motivation regarding this particular piece and not generically.
UncleSlacky 3y ago
Possibly because of this mention in the comments of a recent El Reg article about Wayland: https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/11/29/rhel_10_dropping_x11/#c_4767056 https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/11/29/rhel_10_...

j2kun 3y ago

To what extent have the problems in the book been addressed since 1994?

cf100clunk 3y ago
Could you be more specific?
- justin66 3y ago
  To what extent have the problems in The Unix-Haters Handbook been addressed since 1994?
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Maybe they wanted to know which month you were taking about.
    - cf100clunk 3y ago
      In Unix time please.
tyingq 3y ago
The "plethora of incomplete, incompatible shells" has narrowed down a fair amount if you only include ones in wide use. And "The push for a unified Unix" sort of happened, we're down to 2 or 3 that get any broad attention.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  2 or 3? Linux, and what are the other 1 or 2?
  - tyingq 3y ago
    MacOS, and various might argue Minix (prevalence via Intel Management Engine), or FreeBSD (still very important for a few big companies), etc.

LAC-Tech 3y ago

It's so strange that as far back as the 80s a lot of the criticism of unix is that it wasn't "graphical". Meanwhile in the year 2023 AD I've moved more and more of my workflow to the terminal to escape the rapidly changing, distracting, and visually bloated GUI landscape.

quickthrower2 3y ago
If it is in the terminal (command line to be specific since GUI is possible inside a terminal too) then it is already ready for automation, containerisation, running on a server.
deleted 3y ago
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pjmlp 3y ago
As someone that was alive during those UNIX days, I really don't get the appeal to live in the past.
- LAC-Tech 3y ago
  I just gave you multiple reasons.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Which is why I started as making the point I lived through it, when fancy graphics weren't even an option.
- ploum 3y ago
  I don’t believe it is "the past" which is appealing. We live in a very graphical society, with (moving) pictures everywhere, all the time. But to "think", you need words. As Neal Stephenson put it in "In the beginning was the command line", Words are the only technology available to encode thoughts. While images and sounds convey more emotions. It’s not a coincidence that we are here exchanging words. Command-line, is a way to exchange words with a computer. It is way more precise, more efficient. But it takes learning and thinking. It’s harder the same way it is harder to read a book than to watch a movie. Especially if you never learned to read in the first place which, for the command-line, is approximately everyone but a few geeks. If your goal is to "think" precisely and convey this thinking into something tangible on a computer, then you probably want the command line. But, as it needs a lot of learning, you don’t want it for temporary job. You don’t learn to read because you want to read Harry Potter. You learn to read because you want to spend your life reading books. In "UNIX As Litterature", Scoville argued that UNIX is done by literary people for literary people. People which have a strong "book" culture. People who probably enjoy books more than the movies because "there’s a lot more, it’s more subtle, I can imagine it like I want". Those people, (disclaimer: I count myself in those) may even have too much "graphics" in their daily lives. Too many pictures. Billboards, movies, ads, colored and graphical t-shirts everywhere, branding. Retreating to the command-line feels good, calm, zen. (see Stephenson book again). But, I admit, those people are a minority. Graphical interfaces have the advantage of being intuitive. Intuitive literally means "you don’t need to think" (that’s what intuition is). You click randomly and, by trial and error, you learn some arbitrary rules that the designers decided to use. (when I was teaching basic Windows XP computer use to elders, I once got a very simple question: "how do I know if I need to click once or double click?". I never could answer that. There are no real rule. You learn it and never think about it afterward). So the GUI is really about removing the thinking from the process. Which is good when you don’t care about the process or when you are not really sure what you want. Or when you want something to be quickly done once and for all. Command-line forces you to clarify your thoughts all the time. It is hard. It is energy consuming. But this forces you to take real decisions.

bradford 3y ago

As someone who picked up C++ in the late 90s, the discussion on the language resonates with me: "Other books can tell you how using any of dozens of object-oriented languages can make programmers more productive, make code more robust, and reduce maintenance costs. Don’t expect to see any of these advantages in C++..." "That’s because C++ misses the point of what being object-oriented was all about. Instead of simplifying things, C++ sets a new world record for complexity. Like Unix, C++ was never designed, it mutated as one goofy mistake after another became obvious. It’s just one big mess of afterthoughts. There is no grammar specifying the language (something practically all other languages have), so you can’t even tell when a given line of code is legitimate or not."

pjmlp 3y ago
C++ was born into UNIX, on the same corridor as UNIX and C folks were, hence why its adoption grew alongside UNIX and C. I suggest reading Design and Evolution of C++.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  no. c++'s growth was large projects building largescale apps on MSWindows (Microsoft Office et al), and that started just before "the internet/web". unix grew in somewhat coincidentally the same timeframe, and the timeframe that the internet did because tcp/ip/servers/linux/everything's a stream; client-server was "the thing" and that gave http a place to stand. unix and C are inextricably bound, and that gives C++ some free apron strings to tug, but C++ has never really associated itself with *nix per se. (MS window handles providing a cute place to put a link to the C++ class really cemented it as a "natural" way to interface to C++ OOP for handling UI events)
  - anthk 3y ago
    This. Unix/Linux are bound to C. Unix's API it's just libc. NT Objects and C++ was the natural binding as you say. Even ReactOS has an NT object viewer in their explorer.exe/shel32.dll reimplementation.
  - 3y ago

idkdotcom 3y ago

Say what you will, but I started my professional career with computers back in 1998 doing professional services for HP and its variant of UNIX, HP-UX, and I haven't looked back. As I kid I had played around with a number of personal computers that ran either MS-DOS, Windows or proprietary OS'es (such as the AmigaDOS). To this day, I consider UNIX-Like systems to be a delight. Even Apple had to move to UNIX. Big Tech would not exist without Linux (aka UNIX).

dang 3y ago

Related. Others? The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31417690 - May 2022 (86 comments) The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485 - March 2019 (157 comments) The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614992 - July 2018 (1 comment) The Unix-HATERS Handbook [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15403642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15403642 - Oct 2017 (2 comments) The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815 - March 2017 (307 comments) The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976694 - July 2015 (5 comments) The Unix Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726115 - May 2014 (50 comments) Anti-foreword to the Unix haters handbook by dmr - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3106271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3106271 - Oct 2011 (31 comments) The Unix Haters Handbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272975 - April 2010 (28 comments) The Unix Hater’s Handbook, Reconsidered - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=319773 - Sept 2008 (5 comments)

anotheraccount9 3y ago

I can't wait for an AI/OS to simply ask it what I need to do.

Merrill 3y ago

Fairly early, Bell Labs executives decided to mandate that Bell Labs organizations developing software for the Bell System use Unix, which was from the research organization. This led to many inventive rationales as to why a non-DEC computer and a non-Unix OS where really essential for specific applications. Resistance lasted for some time, but was eventually futile.

wbadart 3y ago

I knew of Don Norman from reading The Design of Everyday Things a few years ago; funny to see his name pop up here! Searching around to make sure it's the same Norman, I came to find out that he wrote an article, The truth about Unix: The user interface is horrid, 7 years before DoET came out (which is confirmed in the Forward)! Had no idea he was on this scene.

eigenhombre 3y ago

The "Illustrations" credit on the cover is covered up by the "Programmers Press" but it looks like it is John Klossner. The hand-drawn illustrations are great, definitely one of my favorite aspects of the book.

tyingq 3y ago
You can click-drag-copy it in at least some pdf renderers. "Illustrations by John Klossner"

simonblack 3y ago

It's ironic that this 30-year-old book, that was produced at a time when UNIX was not the colossus that it and related OSs are today, has been superseded by the course of events. (Same as BYTE Magazine's 1995 cover story "Is UNIX Dead?" presaged its own death by only a few years.) Today, most computers (and phones, TVs, and household appliances also) run on UNIX or a related OS, while the Vaxes of 1994 have disappeared and the Windows Desktop is declining rapidly away. Author's Note: I have never used Windows as my 'daily driver'. I have used a UNIX Desktop throughout the 1990s, and a Linux Desktop since 2001.

kgwgk 3y ago
Worse is better.
KerrAvon 3y ago
I'm not sure about that. The Unixes that the book complains about have been completely out to pasture for a couple of decades. NeXT existed at the time and was specifically excluded.
- cafard 3y ago
  There's a snotty remark about Mach somewhere in there--does that count?
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  You know, your PDF reader probably has a search function, and the book itself has an index, which has numerous references to NeXT and NeXTSTEP. NeXT: 11, 14, 230, 296 NEXTSTEP: 11, 14, 54, 141 OpenStep: 14, 141 Page xxxi of The Unix-Haters Handbook mentions: "In fact, it was typeset using FrameMaker on a Macintosh, a Windows box, and a NeXTstation." (Affectionately called "PainMaker" by its victims.) I wrote three long paragraphs about NeXTSTEP (however you choose to spell and capitalize it), comparing it to NeWS and Display PostScript, in the X-Windows chapter. I even gave Steve Jobs a NeWS demo and a "NeRD" button at EduCOM, the month NeXTSTEP was finally released in November of 1988 (until then it was considered vaporware, and derisively called "NeVRSTEP" -- the critics even made t-shirts): >I gave a NeWS/Pie Menus/HyperTies/Emacs demo to Steve Jobs once, on the trade show floor at the Educom conference, right after he finally released the NeXT Machine, in November of 1988. >Sun was letting me demo NeWS and the stuff we were developing at the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab on a workstation at their booth, and NeXT's booth was right across the aisle, so Ben Shneiderman rope-a-doped him and dragged him over for a demo. He jumped up and down and yelled "That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that's neat. That sucks!" >I figure a 3:1 sucks:neat ratio was pretty good for him comparing something different than his newborn baby NeXT Step, which critics had taken to calling NeVR Step, since it had been vaporware for so long until then. >When I tried to explain to him how flexible NeWS was, he told me "I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!" And one of the editors, Simson Garfinkel <simsong@nextworld.com>, wrote a popular book about NeXTSTEP and was a senior editor at NeXTWORLD magazine. p. 11: Date: Wed, 20 Nov 91 09:37:23 PST From: simsong@nextworld.com To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: Unix names Perhaps keeping track of the different names for various versions of Unix is not a problem for most people, but today the copy editor here Standardizing Unconformity 11 at NeXTWORLD asked me what the difference was between AIX and A/UX. “AIX is Unix from IBM. A/UX is Unix from Apple.” “What’s the difference?” he asked. “I’m not sure. They’re both AT&T System V with gratuitous changes. Then there’s HP-UX which is HP’s version of System V with gratuitous changes. DEC calls its system ULTRIX. DGUX is Data General’s. And don’t forget Xenix—that’s from SCO.” NeXT, meanwhile, calls their version of Unix (which is really Mach with brain-dead Unix wrapped around it) NEXTSTEP. But it’s impossible to get a definition of NEXTSTEP: is it the window system? Objective-C? The environment? Mach? What? p. 13 (although the index says 14: blame PainMaker, which is riddled with features!): Sun Microsystems recently announced that it was joining with NeXT to promulgate OpenStep, a new standard for object-oriented user interfaces. To achieve this openness, Sun would will wrap C++ and DOE around Objective-C and NEXTSTEP. Can’t decide which standard you want to follow? No problem: now you can follow them all. p. 53 (although the index says 54, thanks PainMaker): Hmm… Excuse us for one second: % ls /lib cpp* gcrt0.o libsys_s.a cpp-precomp* i386/ m68k/ crt0.o libsys_p.a posixcrt0.o next% strings /lib/cpp-precomp | grep / /*%s*/ //%s /usr/local/include /NextDeveloper/Headers /NextDeveloper/Headers/ansi /NextDeveloper/Headers/bsd /LocalDeveloper/Headers /LocalDeveloper/Headers/ansi /LocalDeveloper/Headers/bsd /NextDeveloper/2.0CompatibleHeaders %s/%s /lib/%s/specs next% Silly us. NEXTSTEP’s /lib/cpp calls /lib/cpp-precomp. You won’t find that documented on the man page either: next% man cpp-precomp No manual entry for cpp-precomp. p. 140 (FrameMaker's index says 141): X Graphics: Square Peg in a Round Hole "Programming X Windows is like trying to find the square root of pi using roman numerals." —Unknown The PostScript imaging model, used by NeWS and Display PostScript, solves all these horrible problems in a high-level, standard, device independent manner. NeWS has integrated extensions for input, lightweight processes, networking, and windows. It can draw and respond to input in the same arbitrary coordinate system and define window shapes with PostScript paths. The Display PostScript extension for X is intended for output only and doesn’t address any window system issues, which must be dealt with through X. NEXTSTEP is a toolkit written in Objective-C, on top of NeXT’s own window server. NEXTSTEP uses Display PostScript for imaging, but not for input. It has an excellent imaging model and well designed toolkit, but the Display PostScript server is not designed to be programmed with interactive code: instead all events are sent to the client for processing, and the toolkit runs in the client, so it does not have the low bandwidth, context-switching, and code-sharing advantages of NeWS. Nevertheless, it is still superior to X, which lacks the device-independent imaging model. On the other hand, X’s spelling has remained constant over the years, while NeXT has at various times spelled their flagship product “NextStep,” “NeXTstep,” “NeXTStep,” “NeXTSTEP,” “NEXTSTEP,” and finally “OpenStep.” A standardized, consistent spelling is certainly easier on the marketing ’droids. Unfortunately, NeWS and NEXTSTEP were political failures because they suffer from the same two problems: oBNoXiOuS capitalization, and Amiga Persecution Attitude[TM]. p. 230 (hey FrameMaker got one right!!!): Footnote 2: Indeed, there are so many problems with partitioning in Unix that at least one vendor (NeXT, Inc.) recommends that disks be equipped with only a single partition. This is probably because NeXT’s Mach kernel can swap to the Unix file system, rather than requiring a special preallocated space on the system’s hard disk. p. 295 (FrameMaker guessed 296, two out of six ain't bad): Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1991 02:16:03 GMT From: meuer@roch.geom.umn.edu (Mark V. Meuer) Organization: Minnesota Supercomputer Institute Subject: Re: File find delay within Emacs on a NeXT To: help-gnu-emacs@prep.ai.mit.edu In article <1991Sep16.231808.9812@s1.msi.umn.edu> meuer@roch.geom.umn.edu (Mark V. Meuer) writes: I have a NeXT with version 2.1 of the system. We have Emacs 18.55 running. (Please don’t tell me to upgrade to version 18.57 unless you can also supply a pointer to diffs or at least s- and m- files for the NeXT.) There are several machines in our network and we are using yellow pages. The problem is that whenever I try to find a file (either through “C-x C-f”, “emacs file” or through a client talking to the server) Emacs freezes completely for between 15 and 30 seconds. The file then loads and everything works fine. In about 1 in 10 times the file loads immediately with no delay at all. Several people sent me suggestions (thank you!), but the obnoxious delay was finally explained and corrected by Scott Bertilson, one of the really smart people who works here at the Center. For people who have had this problem, one quick hack to correct it is to make /usr/lib/emacs/lock be a symbolic link to /tmp. The full explanation follows. I was able to track down that there was a file called !!!SuperLock!!! in /usr/lib/emacs/lock, and when that file existed the delay would occur. When that file wasn’t there, neither was the delay (usually). We found the segment of code that was causing the problem. When Emacs tries to open a file to edit, it tries to do an exclusive create on the superlock file. If the exclusive create fails, it tries 19 more times with a one second delay between each try. After 20 tries it just ignores the lock file being there and opens the file the user wanted. If it succeeds in creating the lock file, it opens the user’s file and then immediately removes the lock file. The problem we had was that /usr/lib/emacs/lock was mounted over NFS, and apparently NFS doesn’t handle exclusive create as well as one would hope. The command would create the file, but return an error saying it didn’t. Since Emacs thinks it wasn't able to create the lock file, it never removes it. But since it did create the file, all future attempts to open files encounter this lock file and force Emacs to go through a 20-second loop before proceeding. That was what was causing the delay. The hack we used to cure this problem was to make /usr/lib/emacs/lock be a symbolic link to /tmp, so that it would always point to a local directory and avoid the NFS exclusive create bug. I know this is far from perfect, but so far it is working correctly. Thanks to everyone who responded to my plea for help. It’s nice to know that there are so many friendly people on the net.

justinzollars 3y ago

This is pretty awesome (page 75): % rm meese-ethics rm: meese-ethics nonexistent % ar m God ar: God does not exist % "How would you rate Dan Quayle's incompetence? Unmatched ". % ^How did the sex change^ operation go? Modifier failed. % If I had a ( for every $ the Congress spent, what would I have? Too many ('s. % make love Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop. % sleep with me bad character % got a light? No match. % man: why did you get a divorce? man:: Too many arguments. % ^What is saccharine? Bad substitute. %blow %blow: No such job.

rcarmo 3y ago
We have a tongue-in-cheek one in Portuguese: % man teiga # butter No manual entry for teiga

mtraven 3y ago

I founded the original unix-haters list that the book is based off of. What I say these days: Unix went from the worst operating system around, to the best, without getting appreciably better. Not entirely true. But the Unix model of computation has obviously won. The Lisp Machine model, well, nobody even understands what that means any more.

adestefan 3y ago
Just because it's the least bad doesn't mean anyone won.
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jhbadger 3y ago
Well, if we want to, we can use Open Genera to emulate a Symbolics workstation -- on Unix.
metroholografix 3y ago
The Lisp Machine model is represented by Emacs these days (which still has a thriving community). It makes interacting with the Unix model bearable since it can subsume it. If that wasn't possible and I had to make do with just Unix, I would have switched professions. There's only so much bullshit one can take.
DannyBee 3y ago
The list was great. I have the two partial archives that were once posted. Are there any real archives around? I know one of the concerns was redacting names (even with just initials and no mail paths it is obvious who most people are)
tptacek 3y ago
That's a very good quip. Is it yours? Do I credit you for it?

rcarmo 3y ago

I love this. I still keep a copy on my iPhone/iPad for when I want to remember those days.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Where is the Windows-Haters Handbook.

hulitu 3y ago
> Where is the Windows-Haters Handbook. On help.microsoft.com.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

Oh for a time when haters had self-awareness and humor.