obscurity

[dmr at dutoit.UUCP]

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.
First off, I've always been at pains to point out that Ken invented
Unix, though I'm certainly pleased with my contributions.  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.

As to the history in general, I think my BSTJ account is a little
more authoritative than Bourne's, though his is not seriously misleading
despite some mistakes (for example, the first PDP7 Unix was a time-sharing
system; it supported two users).

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.

As to the more general comments in Chong's article: they can be
attacked and defended in various ways; how it comes out depends
as much on what one wants from an operating system as anything else.
There are things on which I would comment: he says,

"Unix was hacked together to do something until they had something
else to do it right.  That right thing never came along and so more and
more got added to Unix... Unix is uniformly mediocre.  It uses the
lowest common denominator between a lot of different types of machines.
In doing so, it doesn't try to do too much and it succeeds well at not
doing too much."

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.

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

	Dennis Ritchie