6 ms·

Unix Conspiracy (1991)

70 points by gjsman-1000 1y ago

linguae 1y ago
Reminds me of this classic I’ve first read many years ago: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html In all seriousness, I have a high respect for Unix and Unix-like systems, particularly FOSS implementations like Linux and FreeBSD. When I first started using Linux in 2004 as a high schooler who grew up on Windows and who used classic Macs in elementary school, the power of the Unix command line and the vast selection of professional-grade software that was available for free, and legally with the source code, too, was mind-blowing. Not too long after that, I started learning about the history of Unix and about its design philosophy. I had a new dream: I wanted to become a computer scientist just like Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie working for a place like Bell Labs, or become a professor and lead research projects like the BSDs back when Berkeley had the CSRG. Downloading and using Linux in 11th grade pushed me away from my alternative thoughts of majoring in linguistics, mathematics, or city planning. Sometime in graduate school I started paying more attention to the Xerox PARC legacy of the Mac, and I started realizing that perhaps Unix was not the pinnacle of operating systems design. I got bitten by the Lisp and Smalltalk bugs, and later I got bitten by the statically-typed functional programming bug (think Haskell and ML). These days my conception of a dream operating system is basically an alternative 1990s universe where somehow the grander visions of some Apple researchers and engineers working on Lisp (e.g., Newton’s planned Lisp OS, Dylan, SK8) came to fruition, complete with Apple’s then-devotion to usability. The classic Macintosh interface and UI guidelines combined with a Lisp substrate that enabled composition and malleability would have knocked the socks off of NeXTstep, and I say this as a big fan of NeXT and Jobs-era Mac OS X. This is my dream OS for workstation-class personal computing. With that said, I have immense respect for Unix, as well as its official successor, Plan 9.
- rjsw 1y ago
  Your dream did happen, Interface Builder on NeXT evolved from a Lisp application on classic Macintosh [1], I have a copy of a paper on SOS Interface. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Hullot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Hullot
- anyfoo 1y ago
  > Sometime in graduate school I started paying more attention to the Xerox PARC legacy of the Mac, and I started realizing that perhaps Unix was not the pinnacle of operating systems design. For me, that watershed moment came when I looked at IBM's AS/400, known today as "IBM i". Despite having used computers since the 80s, and Unix/Linux since about the mid-90s, only much later AS/400 made me realize how extremely unixoid almost every OS I know is (well, every OS I knew after the 8 bit micro era or so). Just like you, it also made me realize how UNIX maybe isn't the answer to all, and that it's maybe not such a good thing that we've pretty much settled on it. I've heard that apparently MULTICS, one of UNIX's major influences, gives people a similar impression when they revisit it nowadays, and realize how advanced it was. I personally have not looked into it yet. (The other OS that expanded my horizon on how different OSes can be from what I know is MVS on IBM mainframes, but unlike AS/400, not really on a necessarily good way.)
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    For me, it was Plan 9. In some ways, it was mind-bending to not have root. I haven't played with it recently; maybe it has gotten easier to play with alternative OSes since I tried 10 years ago.
  - floren 1y ago
    > made me realize how extremely unixoid almost every OS I know is It's a bit disappointing that every time somebody decides to write their own kernel, the first thing they do is implement some subset of the POSIX spec.
    - anyfoo 1y ago
      Indeed. But to be fair, in today's world it is not only somewhat hard to imagine an OS that does not rely on things such as a filesystem with opaque binary files, directories, and hierarchical paths connecting these, but in order to properly communicate with the "outside world" you more or less have to have those things. Even AS/400 / IBM i added IFS, which is basically a bolted on hierarchical filesystem, to their system a long time ago by now. Still sad that it has to be that way. I've long come off of thinking "everything is a file", and a file then just being a binary blob, is a good thing. (That's not even talking about other concepts from Unix we take for fully granted yet.)
- pjmlp 1y ago
  I went down a similar path. I was already tainted by starting on 8 an 16 bit home computers, the magic of Amiga and OS/2, before getting into UNIX via Xenix. The wonderful dungeon of the university library did the rest, showing me all the alternative universe. It also helped my university was keen into teaching the ways of Smalltalk, Lisp, ML, Prolog, Oberon, in addition to classical UNIX lectures. I was really lucky in that regard.
tomhow 1y ago
The origin of this is the Jargon File [1] v. 2.3.1, published on 3 Jan 1991: http://www.catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg231.txt http://www.catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg231.txt This exact version of it was first published in v. 4.0.0, on 24 Jul 1996: http://www.catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg400.txt http://www.catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg400.txt That was then published as The New Hacker's Dictionary, third edition, 1996: https://books.google.com.vc/books?id=g80P_4v4QbIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com.vc/books?id=g80P_4v4QbIC&printsec=f... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File
pipeline_peak 1y ago
I’ve read (probably on Wikipedia) that the popularity of Unix was to blame by few for the stagnancy in OS research. To be fair, it’s not a stretch to suspect a company wants its competitors to be dependent on their product. The theory of planned security vulnerabilities sounds off the plot however.
- anyfoo 1y ago
  As elaborated in another comment, I am not a fan of UNIX having won (anymore), but I find this "conspiracy" ridiculous. It's obvious to me that UNIX was seen as a good idea by many people, and that it did make a lot of sense compared to many alternatives, especially considering the constraints of computers and computing environments at the time.
1oooqooq 1y ago
amazing how that website manages to render white text on a light image and show empty text on Firefox reader feature. i don't think I've seen someone able to break so many standards :)
- hulitu 1y ago
  > amazing amazing ? I thought this was the norm. /s The days, when OSs let you select text and background colors, are long gone.
- doctor_blood 1y ago
  Just tested it myself; FF reader works as expected for both desktop and mobile. The server was under a heavier load than usual - it's possible the page hadn't finished loading for you, or was missing elements when you toggled reader mode.
lupusreal 1y ago
This is bullshit, but I believe it.
Ericson2314 1y ago
Worse is better is viral! (This conspiracy may not be factually true, but it is teleologically true)
userbinator 1y ago
relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades That seems more applicable to Windows these days. If you graph CVEs vs. version, there is an interesting trend.
paganpedos 1y ago
[dead]
williamDafoe 1y ago
Multics : everything is a memory segment, just get out your soldering iron and wirecutters to begin porting Multics to your hardware today! IBM: everything is a record type, we have 320 different modules to help you deal with all 320 system-standard record types, and we can even convert some of them to others. And we have 50,000 unfixable bugs because other pieces of code depend upon the bug working the way it does ... UNIX: everything is an ASCII byte. Done I started writing code in the 1970s on TOPS-10, TWENEX, PLATO, and my undergrad thesis advisor helped to invent Multics. The benefits of UNIX are real, folks, the snake oil is the hardware vendors who HATE how it levels the playing field ...
dinklenuts 1y ago
I liked to joke that Netflix popularised chaos engineering so that their competitors would deliberately, repeatedly cripple their infrastructure.
- dmazin 1y ago
  That’s a strange way to put it because it makes infrastructure more robust, the opposite of “crippling”. A funnier version would be they’re in cahoots with AWS since robust infrastructure is more expensive.
lenerdenator 1y ago
> This would be accomplished by disseminating an operating system that is apparently inexpensive and easily portable, but also relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades from AT&T). I remember watching a YouTube UNIX wars documentary that posits the exact opposite. It argued that top brass at AT&T saw UNIX as a means to the telecommunications end, not a business in its own right. When it became more popular in the 1980s, it became obvious that they'd be bad businessmen if they didn't at least make a feeble attempt at making money off of it, so some exec at Ma Bell decided to charge thousands (if not tens of thousands; I can't find a reliable primary source online with a cursory search) per license to keep the computer business from getting to be too much of a distraction from AT&T's telecoms business. That limited it to the only places that were doing serious OS research at the time: universities. Then some nerd at a Finnish university decided to make a kernel that fit into the GNU ecosystem, and the rest is history.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  AT&T was prohibited from entering the OS/software business by the consent decree of... 1956, I think? They legally could not make a business out of selling Unix. So they distributed the tapes for more or less the cost of the tapes, IIRC.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Yes, that is how UNIX and C won the OS wars. As soon as they were allowed to profit from UNIX, the Lion's book got forbidden, and the BSD lawsuit took place.
anonymousiam 1y ago
Eric's server is probably melting. It took ten seconds to load 1.5k of text.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

70 points by gjsman-1000 1y ago

Reminds me of this classic I’ve first read many years ago: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html In all seriousness, I have a high respect for Unix and Unix-like systems, particularly FOSS implementations like Linux and FreeBSD. When I first started using Linux in 2004 as a high schooler who grew up on Windows and who used classic Macs in elementary school, the power of the Unix command line and the vast selection of professional-grade software that was available for free, and legally with the source code, too, was mind-blowing. Not too long after that, I started learning about the history of Unix and about its design philosophy. I had a new dream: I wanted to become a computer scientist just like Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie working for a place like Bell Labs, or become a professor and lead research projects like the BSDs back when Berkeley had the CSRG. Downloading and using Linux in 11th grade pushed me away from my alternative thoughts of majoring in linguistics, mathematics, or city planning. Sometime in graduate school I started paying more attention to the Xerox PARC legacy of the Mac, and I started realizing that perhaps Unix was not the pinnacle of operating systems design. I got bitten by the Lisp and Smalltalk bugs, and later I got bitten by the statically-typed functional programming bug (think Haskell and ML). These days my conception of a dream operating system is basically an alternative 1990s universe where somehow the grander visions of some Apple researchers and engineers working on Lisp (e.g., Newton’s planned Lisp OS, Dylan, SK8) came to fruition, complete with Apple’s then-devotion to usability. The classic Macintosh interface and UI guidelines combined with a Lisp substrate that enabled composition and malleability would have knocked the socks off of NeXTstep, and I say this as a big fan of NeXT and Jobs-era Mac OS X. This is my dream OS for workstation-class personal computing. With that said, I have immense respect for Unix, as well as its official successor, Plan 9.

rjsw 1y ago
Your dream did happen, Interface Builder on NeXT evolved from a Lisp application on classic Macintosh [1], I have a copy of a paper on SOS Interface. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Hullot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Hullot
anyfoo 1y ago
> Sometime in graduate school I started paying more attention to the Xerox PARC legacy of the Mac, and I started realizing that perhaps Unix was not the pinnacle of operating systems design. For me, that watershed moment came when I looked at IBM's AS/400, known today as "IBM i". Despite having used computers since the 80s, and Unix/Linux since about the mid-90s, only much later AS/400 made me realize how extremely unixoid almost every OS I know is (well, every OS I knew after the 8 bit micro era or so). Just like you, it also made me realize how UNIX maybe isn't the answer to all, and that it's maybe not such a good thing that we've pretty much settled on it. I've heard that apparently MULTICS, one of UNIX's major influences, gives people a similar impression when they revisit it nowadays, and realize how advanced it was. I personally have not looked into it yet. (The other OS that expanded my horizon on how different OSes can be from what I know is MVS on IBM mainframes, but unlike AS/400, not really on a necessarily good way.)
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  For me, it was Plan 9. In some ways, it was mind-bending to not have root. I haven't played with it recently; maybe it has gotten easier to play with alternative OSes since I tried 10 years ago.
- floren 1y ago
  > made me realize how extremely unixoid almost every OS I know is It's a bit disappointing that every time somebody decides to write their own kernel, the first thing they do is implement some subset of the POSIX spec.
  - anyfoo 1y ago
    Indeed. But to be fair, in today's world it is not only somewhat hard to imagine an OS that does not rely on things such as a filesystem with opaque binary files, directories, and hierarchical paths connecting these, but in order to properly communicate with the "outside world" you more or less have to have those things. Even AS/400 / IBM i added IFS, which is basically a bolted on hierarchical filesystem, to their system a long time ago by now. Still sad that it has to be that way. I've long come off of thinking "everything is a file", and a file then just being a binary blob, is a good thing. (That's not even talking about other concepts from Unix we take for fully granted yet.)
pjmlp 1y ago
I went down a similar path. I was already tainted by starting on 8 an 16 bit home computers, the magic of Amiga and OS/2, before getting into UNIX via Xenix. The wonderful dungeon of the university library did the rest, showing me all the alternative universe. It also helped my university was keen into teaching the ways of Smalltalk, Lisp, ML, Prolog, Oberon, in addition to classical UNIX lectures. I was really lucky in that regard.

tomhow 1y ago

The origin of this is the Jargon File [1] v. 2.3.1, published on 3 Jan 1991: http://www.catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg231.txt http://www.catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg231.txt This exact version of it was first published in v. 4.0.0, on 24 Jul 1996: http://www.catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg400.txt http://www.catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg400.txt That was then published as The New Hacker's Dictionary, third edition, 1996: https://books.google.com.vc/books?id=g80P_4v4QbIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com.vc/books?id=g80P_4v4QbIC&printsec=f... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File

pipeline_peak 1y ago

I’ve read (probably on Wikipedia) that the popularity of Unix was to blame by few for the stagnancy in OS research. To be fair, it’s not a stretch to suspect a company wants its competitors to be dependent on their product. The theory of planned security vulnerabilities sounds off the plot however.

anyfoo 1y ago
As elaborated in another comment, I am not a fan of UNIX having won (anymore), but I find this "conspiracy" ridiculous. It's obvious to me that UNIX was seen as a good idea by many people, and that it did make a lot of sense compared to many alternatives, especially considering the constraints of computers and computing environments at the time.

1oooqooq 1y ago

amazing how that website manages to render white text on a light image and show empty text on Firefox reader feature. i don't think I've seen someone able to break so many standards :)

hulitu 1y ago
> amazing amazing ? I thought this was the norm. /s The days, when OSs let you select text and background colors, are long gone.
doctor_blood 1y ago
Just tested it myself; FF reader works as expected for both desktop and mobile. The server was under a heavier load than usual - it's possible the page hadn't finished loading for you, or was missing elements when you toggled reader mode.

lupusreal 1y ago

This is bullshit, but I believe it.

Ericson2314 1y ago

Worse is better is viral! (This conspiracy may not be factually true, but it is teleologically true)

userbinator 1y ago

relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades That seems more applicable to Windows these days. If you graph CVEs vs. version, there is an interesting trend.

paganpedos 1y ago

[dead]

williamDafoe 1y ago

Multics : everything is a memory segment, just get out your soldering iron and wirecutters to begin porting Multics to your hardware today! IBM: everything is a record type, we have 320 different modules to help you deal with all 320 system-standard record types, and we can even convert some of them to others. And we have 50,000 unfixable bugs because other pieces of code depend upon the bug working the way it does ... UNIX: everything is an ASCII byte. Done I started writing code in the 1970s on TOPS-10, TWENEX, PLATO, and my undergrad thesis advisor helped to invent Multics. The benefits of UNIX are real, folks, the snake oil is the hardware vendors who HATE how it levels the playing field ...

dinklenuts 1y ago

I liked to joke that Netflix popularised chaos engineering so that their competitors would deliberately, repeatedly cripple their infrastructure.

dmazin 1y ago
That’s a strange way to put it because it makes infrastructure more robust, the opposite of “crippling”. A funnier version would be they’re in cahoots with AWS since robust infrastructure is more expensive.

lenerdenator 1y ago

> This would be accomplished by disseminating an operating system that is apparently inexpensive and easily portable, but also relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades from AT&T). I remember watching a YouTube UNIX wars documentary that posits the exact opposite. It argued that top brass at AT&T saw UNIX as a means to the telecommunications end, not a business in its own right. When it became more popular in the 1980s, it became obvious that they'd be bad businessmen if they didn't at least make a feeble attempt at making money off of it, so some exec at Ma Bell decided to charge thousands (if not tens of thousands; I can't find a reliable primary source online with a cursory search) per license to keep the computer business from getting to be too much of a distraction from AT&T's telecoms business. That limited it to the only places that were doing serious OS research at the time: universities. Then some nerd at a Finnish university decided to make a kernel that fit into the GNU ecosystem, and the rest is history.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago
AT&T was prohibited from entering the OS/software business by the consent decree of... 1956, I think? They legally could not make a business out of selling Unix. So they distributed the tapes for more or less the cost of the tapes, IIRC.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Yes, that is how UNIX and C won the OS wars. As soon as they were allowed to profit from UNIX, the Lion's book got forbidden, and the BSD lawsuit took place.

anonymousiam 1y ago

Eric's server is probably melting. It took ten seconds to load 1.5k of text.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]