EFFORTPOST How The Unix Haters Won

Chances are if you are using a device in 2024 you have likely touched a Unix systems: your phone, your appliances, and web serves are all using UNIX or UNIX likes. Created in the mid 70s at Bell labs, primarily by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, Unix was a multi user multi tasking operating system built for mainframe computers. It was built on a philosophy of simplicity where a set of small programs which each did one thing well would be able to communicate together to accomplish more complex tasks.

It was originally built just for software development but became more popular as it was licensed out to various universities, governments, and corporations (due to AT&Ts relationship with bell labs they could not sell UNIX directly but had to license it to other parties). Most famously was BSD by Berkley which lives on as the BSD line of OSes. One of these licenses was sold to Microsoft who then created Xenix, which was then sub licensed to other parties making it briefly the most popular UNIX version until it was oudated with UNIX 4 and 5 by AT&T and Sun.

At the same time Microsoft had made a deal to provide a lighter OS for IBM's line of personal computers since they were to under powered for Unix so they hired Tim Paterson who had created 86-DOS for Seattle Computer Products Intel Machines to port the DOS system to IBM PCs, IBM PC DOS, and bought the DOS rights from him creating MS-DOS. An under powered 16 bit single tasking piece of shit. Microsoft positioned DOS as the companion to XENIX with the two being compatible and hoped to eventually make DOS identical to single user XENIX called XEDOS. Until Bell labs broke up and AT&T could just start straight up selling UNIX V which blew XENIX out of the water.

With DOS being so shit MS began working with IBM on a new OS called O/S 2 to replace DOS. Eventually the culture clash got to be too much and the success of the DOS based Windows 3 convinced to continue with DOS while IBM kept OS/2. As powerful multi processing OSs which could multi task effectively became common competitors like Sun UNIX line, OS2, OpenVMS, and Next Step offered better multi processing more power and backwards DOS support.

In this soup is where the Unix Haters mailing list emerged. It ran from around 1988 to 1993 and was a place for people to rant about UNIX. This was collected in the 1994 book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook. I think the motive of the Unix Haters becomes clear when you look at who wrote the intro for the book, Don Norman, a user experience engineer at Apple. The Unix Haters view Unix as a inhuman, inaccessible dinosaur which is used not because it is intuitive or user friendly but because it was first and now its everywhere. The book is mostly a polemic of rants about bad experiences and vivid metaphors:

Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the other numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes a mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the center of the dashboard. “The experienced driver,” says Thompson, “will usually know what's wrong.”

In a previous job selling Lisp Machines, I was often asked about Unix. If the audience was not mixed gender, I would sometimes compare Unix to herpes—lots of people have it, nobody wants it, they got screwed when they got it, and if they could, they would get rid of it. There would be smiles, heads would nod, and that would usually end the discussion about Unix.

I have a natural revulsion to any operating system that shows so little planning as to have to named all of its commands after digestive noises (awk, grep, fsck, nroff).

If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles—but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that.

Q. Where did the names “C” and “C++” come from?

A. They were grades.

In between these metaphors are the same few points made over and over again: 1. Unix commands do not follow logical names for instance grep searches files, awk is a text replacement as is sed, cat concatenates files and/or displays constants to the command line, fsck checks file systems ect. This is a mostly pedantic argument since any experienced Unix user knows these by heart its also pointless in the internet age and only really applies to first time non programmers. 2. Pipes are too limited and difficult to use as they only go one way and transfer text as is the bash shell since allows for custom programs with unique syntax. The authors compare this to Macintosh which has independent programs with their own discreet files:

When was the last time your Unix workstation was as useful as a Macintosh? When was the last time it ran programs from different companies (or even different divisions of the same company) that could really communicate? If it's done so at all, it's because some Mac software vendor sweated blood porting its programs to Unix, and tried to make Unix look more like the Mac.

The fundamental difference between Unix and the Macintosh operating system is that Unix was designed to please programmers, whereas the Macwas designed to please users.

Unix was literally made for programmers and working Ill say in my own work bash scripting a nice quick and dirty automation tool.

3. RM is a powerful command which does not warn the user of its dangers as using it you can easily destroy a whole system if you make a type while far up the root:

I too have had a similar disaster using rm. Once I was removing a file system from my disk which was something like /usr/foo/bin. I was in /usr/foo and had removed several parts of the system by:

% rm -r ./etc

% rm -r ./adm

…and so on. But when it came time to do ./bin, I missed the period. System didn't like that too much.

Unix wasn't designed to live after the mortal blow of losing its /bin directory. An intelligent operating system would have given the user a chance to recover (or at least confirm whether he really wanted to render the operating system inoperable).

To this I say skill issue plain and simple. Reminds me of a student in another lab whose PI has a strict "no rm" rule for students working on the supercomputer .

4. Bad documentation. This mostly came from the At&T commericalization. Pretty much no company wants documentation out there for their commercial OS otherwise you can easily leave the plantation I mean can anyone show me the windows NT 10 kernel documentation?

Beyond that many complaints here are outdated. Whining about usenet speeds? Whining about C++ being as inefficient as COBOL? Whining about x windows being too slow? Whining about Sendmail? Even worse a few years after this book the 1991 Unix like kernal Linux by Linus Torvalds would start to gain massive popularity outliving Unix itself. Eventually Linux would get desktop enviroments which would have options like a trash can for restoring data and Mac like programs while offering a unix like command line system.

The Unix haters hand book is at the end of the day a relic of its time a time when raw At&T commercial UNIX was still a major player and before the GNU/Linux FOSS revolution really took off while some of their complaints remain unaddressed many did and many others just come off as the rantings of fresh faced college noobs or normies who are angry their high end academic programming rig isnt built for r-slurs like 1993 Macintosh (the time when Apple was doing so well they nearly went bankrupt and had to but Next Step in 1996 so Steve Jobs could raid them and replace Mac OS with a good OS like NextStep/OSX).

Still the Unix haters aren't done yet for I haven't mentioned the one true Unix hater. Where we left off in history Microsoft needed a proper 32 bit OS with great multi tasking support so they did what they did best and just stole quality by poaching Dave Cutler from Digital Equipment Corporation who had just made the 32 bit operating system openVMS to make Windows NT.

So Windows NT 3.1 launched a year after DOS 3.1 looking mostly the same but running a heck of a lot nicer since its proper 32 bit with a new NTFS file system and not a 16 bit piece of shit doing programming frickery

When the magic of the windows 9x series happened, remember MS was wringing over 5 years out of a really shitty OS they bought in 1980 when the competition ran so much bettter, NT entered version 4.0 before becoming windows 2000.

After the disaster that was Windows ME on DOS, DOS was fully phased out for the NT kernal with Windows vista and has maintained its status was the Windows kernal up till Windows NT Kernal 10.0 which powers windows 10 and 11.

What does this have to do with Unix Haters? Well Dave Cutler is the ultimate UNIX hater!!

Ballmer reassured him. The bright side was finally --finally-- NT had a large target market. Some portion of Windows owners would adopt NT. This put Cutler in a much better position to define the next generation of PC software, placing him at the apex of technical power in the computer industry. Besides, NT would still meet the goals closest to Cutler's heart: portability, reliability and the ability to provide an alternative to Unix, the splintered high-end operating program.

This last goal was crucial to Cutler. "Unix is like Cutler's lifelong foe," said one team member who'd worked with Cutler for nearly two decades. "It's like his Moriarty [Sherlock Holmes's nemesis]. He thinks Unix is a junk operating program designed by a committee of Ph.D.s. There's never been one mind behind the whole thing, and it shows. So he's always been out to get Unix. But this is the first time he's had the chance."

• according to the book Show-stopper! : the breakneck race to create Windows NT and the next generation at Microsoft which has never been confirmed by Cutler himself

Still its fun to imagine Cutler slaving away in the Azure and Xbox dungeons content knowing he has stopped the year of the linux Unix desktop ... forever.

Or until Windows 13 ships with the linux kernal running KDE plasma skinned to look like Windows 7 and windows software under compatibility layers.

Or maybe Microsoft, Google, and IBM's funding of GNOME will pay off and once KDE and XFCE are killed linux users will be forced to choose between the ugliest barf tier anti productivity desktop ever or run back into the loving arms of whatever OSX/KDE adware hybrid UI Windows 13 is running.

!codecels MAJOR OS DRAMA !cuteandvalid New effort post !zoomers look old OSs all zoomers love neurodivergent old OSs its why we invent slop like haikuOS

!jannies this is an effortpost I just couldnt mark it cause the effortpost tick box doesnt work with drafting and I have so many images I need to draft or furryfox crashes