The Unix Haters' Handbook

[Liam Proven]

When I was a baby geek, I remember reading about this seminal text, a
distillation from a long-active mailing list called UNIX-HATERS. Now,
it's available for free:

http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters.html

(Yes, I know. Don't hold the URL against it. Get it, read it. It's
funny, interesting, fun and free.)

It's a good & enjoyable read. I'm nearly at the end of it now.

It's interesting to look back at this 1991 (-ish) book from the
perspective of 2008. How many of the criticisms levelled against Unix
were stuff that users of then-older OSs thought was deranged.

Today, the same sort of rivalry exists between Unix and Windows
people; the stuff before them is nearly forgotten now. I mean, I've
been in this business for some 20y (and another 5-10y before that as a
hobbyist) and I've never seen TOPS or MULTICS or ITS or anything like
them.

What I'm wondering is, how many of the criticisms levelled against
Unix (and thus, by association, Linux) in this book from 17y ago are
still current or valid today. I've been using Linux for 11-12y now,
but I still regard myself as something of a beginner, whereas I've
known Windows since it was 2 and can make it jump backwards through
flaming hoops.

A lot's changed. Hardware is much more homogeneous - a modern personal
computer is either an IBM-compatible x86 box or something much like
it; even later PowerPC Macs, Acorn-compatible RISC OS machines, Amiga
clones and stuff like that are very PC-like in many ways. They use the
same slots, buses, interfaces, RAM, disks and so on.

The old problems that plagued Unix 1980s & 1990s Unix - incompatible
keyboard layouts & terminal control codes, untrustworthy filesystems,
lousy performance, all sorts of things - have gone away now,
obliterated by advances in hardware and software design, increasing
consolidation and standardization of the computer industry, and the
simple progression of Moore's Law. Once, "Eight Megs And Constantly
Swapping" was pejorative; now, an app that uses only 8MB is positively
svelte.

If you don't already know it, give it a read.

I am not really a Linux expert - maybe a power user or competent
sysadmin, at best. I do have lots of comparative OS knowledge, but
most of it is of systems that came along long after Unix. I'd be
really interested to know the thoughts of modern Linux gurus on how
much of the criticism in the UHH is still valid today.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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