The UNIXHATERS Handbook pdf

The UNIX- HATERS Handbook The UNIX- HATERS Handbook “Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don’t think that is a coincidence.” Edited by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, and Steven Strassmann Illustrations by John Klossner PROGRAMMERS PRESS IDG BOOKS ® iv IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. An International Data Group Company San Mateo, California • Indianapolis, Indiana • Boston, Massachusetts The UNIX-HATERS Handbook Published by IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. An International Data Group Company 155 Bovet Road, Suite 310 San Mateo, CA 94402 Copyright  1994 by IDG Books Worldwide. All rights reserved. No part of this book (including interior design, cover design, and illustrations) may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 1-56884-203-1 Printed in the United States of America First Printing, May, 1994 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Distributed in the United States by IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. Distributed in Canada by Macmillan of Canada, a Division of Canada Publishing Corporation; by Computer and Technical Books in Miami, Florida, for South America and the Caribbean; by Longman Singapore in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Korea; by Toppan Co. Ltd. in Japan; by Asia Computerworld in Hong Kong; by Woodslane Pty. Ltd. in Australia and New Zealand; and by Transword Publishers Ltd. in the U.K. and Europe. For information on where to purchase IDG’s books outside the U.S., contact Christina Turner at 415-312-0633. For information on translations, contact Marc Jeffrey Mikulich, Foreign Rights Manager, at IDG Books Worldwide; FAX number: 415-358-1260. For sales inquires and special prices for bulk quantities, contact Tony Real at 415-312-0644. Trademarks: Unix is a trademark of Novell. All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. IDG Books Worldwide is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: The authors and publisher of this book have used their best efforts in preparing this book. IDG Books Worldwide, Inc., International Data Group, Inc., and the authors make no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book, and specifically disclaim any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and shall in no event be liable for any v loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential or other damages. vi To Ken and Dennis, without whom this book would not have been possible. vii Credits Vice President and Publisher Chris Williams Senior Editor Trudy Neuhaus Imprint Manager Amorette Pedersen Production Manager Beth Jenkins Cover Design Kavish & Kavish Book Design and Production Simson Garfinkel & Steven Strassmann viii About IDG Books Worldwide Welcome to the world of IDG Books Worldwide. 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At IDG, we value quality, and we have been delivering quality for over 25 years. You’ll find no better book on a subject than an IDG book. John Kilcullen President and CEO IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. ix x [...]... swap space for the privilege of using a mouse with my editor (Emacs itself is a third large mass.) The Sun kernel was just plain running out of room Every trivial hack you make to the window system replicates the entire window system But that’s not all: Apparently there are other behemoths of the swap volume There are some network things with truly stupendous-sized data segments Moreover, they grow over... Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego He is the author of more than 12 books including The Design of Everyday Things Dennis Ritchie, Head of the Computing Techniques Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories He and Ken Thompson are considered by many to be the fathers of Unix In the interest of fairness, we asked Dennis to write our Anti-Foreword Scott Burson, the author of Zeta C, the first... to pasture by the commercial success of Unix, but it would be an error to do so: our judgments are keen, our sense of the possible pure, and our outrage authentic We seek progress, not the reestablishment of ancient relics xxii Preface Our story started when the economics of computing began marching us, one by one, into the Unix Gulag We started passing notes to each other At first, they spoke of... Unix entirely The UNIX-HATERS History The year was 1987, and Michael Travers, a graduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory, was taking his first steps into the future For years Travers had written large and beautiful programs at the console of his Sym- The UNIX-HATERS History xxiii bolics Lisp Machine (affectionately known as a LispM), one of two stateof -the- art AI workstations at the Lab But it... cannot be patched either; you must have the source so you can patch THAT, and then regenerate the application from the source But I sure wanted my Sun’s mouse to talk to Emacs So I got a couple hundred lines of code (from GNU source) to compile, and link with the very same code that is shared by all the standard Sun window applications (“tools”) Presto! Emacs gets mice! Just like the LispM; I remember... A The Trouble with Unix: The User Interface is Horrid Datamation, 27 (12) 1981, November pp 139-150 Reprinted in Pylyshyn, Z W., & Bannon, L J., eds Perspectives on the Computer Revolution, 2nd revised edition, Hillsdale, NJ, Ablex, 1989 What is this horrible fascination with Unix? The operating system of the 1960s, still gaining in popularity in the 1990s A horrible system, except that all the other... need for costly booting operations But, of course, Suns are very good at booting! So good, they sometimes spontaneously boot, just to let you know they’re in peak form! Well, the console just complained about the lack of memory again Gosh, there isn’t time to talk about the other LispM features I’ve been free of for the last week Such as incremental recompilation and loading Or incremental testing of programs,... against Unix itself, but against the cult of Unix zealots who defend and nurture it They take the heat, disease, and pesti- xxviii Preface lence as givens, and, as ancient shamans did, display their wounds, some self-inflicted, as proof of their power and wizardry We aim, through bluntness and humor, to show them that they pray to a tin god, and that science, not religion, is the path to useful and friendly... survived Unix was designed for the computing environment of then, not the machines of today Unix survives only because everyone else has done so badly There were many valuable things to be learned from Unix: how come nobody learned them and then did better? Started from scratch and produced a really superior, modern, graphical operating system? Oh yeah, xvii and did the other thing that made Unix so... Imprint Manager The UNIX-HATERS cover was illustrated by Ken Copfelt of The Stock Illustration Source Typographical Conventions In this book, we use this roman font for most of the text and a different sans serif font for the horror stories from the UNIX-HATERS mailing list We’ve tried to put command names, where they appear, in bold, and the names of Unix system functions in italics There’s also a . The UNIX- HATERS Handbook The UNIX- HATERS Handbook “Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD. photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 1-56884-203-1 Printed in the United States of America First