obscurity

[Herb Chong]

In article <2102 at dutoit.UUCP> dmr at dutoit.UUCP writes:
>Herb Chong's delayed article propagates wrong history.  Twice he quotes
>someone from Purdue who claims "Are you aware that Dennis Ritchie once
>said that if he had known about Tenex, he would never have invented Unix?"
>For the record, I'm not aware of saying that, or anything like it.

in the absence of tapes of everything anyone has ever said about unix,
i have to assume that someone has some idea what they're talking about
without having to bring one of the originators to testify.  in
otherwords, since unix was invented when i was still in highschool and
didn't know what FORTRAN meant, i had to believe somebody. 8-)

>First off, I've always been at pains to point out that Ken invented
and didn't know what FORTRAN meant i have to believe someone else. 8-)

yes, i am aware that you are credited with inventing C, a totally
different thing.

>The only
>observation about Tenex I can remember making publicly was along these
>lines: we were very lucky not to have gotten a PDP10 to write a system
>for, because then very early Unix would have had to compete not only
>with DEC's operating system, but also with Tenex, for the small PDP10
>market, and both TOPS-10 and Tenex were pretty decent systems.  As it
>actually happened, there were lots and lots of PDP11s, the DEC
>software was ghastly, and so many groups were willing to risk trying
>Unix.

i guess this is going to end up in one form or another as an anecdote
from the dark ages of computing garbled to a greater or lesser degree
by comments like mine a 30 years from now.  of course, i'd rather be
remembered for the wrong thing than not be remembered at all! 8-)

>Herb also muses "... he [DMR] would rather forget that he invented
>Unix, despite its success.  I have heard that he once said that he
>feels like someone who started a religion that he now sees all the flaws
>in, but no one else seems to want to listen.  He feels caught up in
>something he no longer believes in."

>Perhaps someone caught me in a wry mood in which I muttered something
>about religious fanatics.  I do try to be honest with myself and others
>about flaws, limitations, and failures of Unix to reach utter
>perfection and universality.  However, to put matters as modestly as
>possible:  I do not hold the feelings ascribed to me in the quoted
>paragraph.

this was heard second hand from someone who attended a talk given at
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (where i work) that i did not go to.
i forget who actually claimed to have heard you say this or whether in
fact the talker had said he had heard it from you directly or not.  i
think Brian Kernighan was the speaker.  that is why i worded it the way
i did since i never heard it myself.  as it is, i think it may have
been appropriate for the audience, most who have only heard of unix as
an operating system for lunatics and other fringe types running DEC
(heaven forbid!) equipment. 8-)

>I assure you that Unix was not designed to be thrown away when
>something better came along. Rather, it exhibits a strong, coherent
>and manifestly successful set of beliefs about how to construct and
>furnish a certain kind of computing environment.  It is not uniformly
>mediocre: it is absolutely excellent at providing interactive computing
>for program development, scientific computing, text processing and the
>like, and perfectly horrible for DP by banks and insurance companies,
>or transaction processing by airlines.

which is all totally true, but you'd never know it from the marketing
hype in such publications as Unix World.  a lot of articles come by in
this news group by people who think that unix is the be-all and end-all
operating system.  it isn't.  it has a niche which it fills very well
thank you.  as someone who designs and implements operating systems for
a living, i am well aware of the limitations of unix as well as it's
advantages.  the uniformity in the treatment of files as virtual disk
devices is a great advantage from the programmers' point of view.  the
fragility of the filesystem implementation is not so great (having
recently patched some filesystems where the free-list was being
scribbled on by the hardware).

the documentation is just horrible, especially for a new user.  an
operating system that is going to be used is much more than just an
elegant design and careful implementation.  it's also the supporting
tools (which need not be programs and/or libraries of functions).
perhaps when unix was still a small enough to be printed on a few
hundred pages (for all of it), the documentation was adequate.  today,
it is mostly inadequate.  word-of-mouth is more trusted.  supplying
source is not an answer either.  the machine i am posting this from has
an operating system that source cannot be obtained for.  so much of the
documentation assumes, no make that requires, source to translate what
the english says in to something meaningful.

>Finally, I would agree completely with the last quoted sentence if
>it said, "it succeeds well by not doing too much."

the flip side of this is for the people who don't want to build the
medium level tools for applications.  yes, it is essential that an
operating system provide enough flexibility to do pretty much
what the user wants without contortions of the worst kind in coding,
but there is also providing enough medium level support to do things
without re-inventing the wheel all the time.  the main example
i'm thinking of is file-locking, but the sys5 people will say they've
had it for a long time.  i realize that locking is not a trivial
thing and i don't pretend to have the answers.

in summary, since i'm too young to have actually participated in that
bit of history, i can only quote from people who claim to know what
they're talking about until i find out otherwise.  the other thing is
that i hate people who won't open up their minds enough to try
something different, to study it and compare.  the unix users community
has a lot of tunnel vision but it is not the only one with it.

Herb Chong...

I'm still user-friendly -- I don't byte, I nybble....

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