Date: Tue, 01 Jun 1999 19:31:57 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: David Scheidt <dscheidt@enteract.com> Cc: Darryl Okahata <darrylo@sr.hp.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Kernel config script: Message-ID: <3754898D.D2C7E08D@softweyr.com> References: <Pine.NEB.3.96.990601170731.40428A-100000@shell-3.enteract.com>
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David Scheidt wrote:
>
> On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Wes Peters wrote:
>
> > If you mean "lack of competition would make UNIX more homogenous and
> > more viable to every Tom, Dick, and Jane that comes down the pike,"
> > I will agree with that. I just disagree that this is success. UNIX
> > was never meant to be a word processor loader, and complete overkill
> > for such an application.
>
> I should point out that UNIX's suitably as a document processing
> enviornment is one of the reasons that UNIX received support from
> BTL management. The fact that it was stable, ran on cheap hardware,
> and a cool programing enviornment were bonuses.
According to PJ, you've got it exactly backwards. The people who
created it did so because they wanted to fix all the things that
went wrong with the Multics project. Once they'd essentially done
this, they wanted to continue to work on their new system, and looked
for a way to "sell" it to Lab management. Joe Ossana was looking
into document processing tools and talked to some of the UNIX people,
and history was made. The ongoing text processing work became one
of several projects that were developed at Bell Labs on UNIX, but
it was not the reason UNIX was created.
And, as far as *word processors* go, troff, nroff, and ed pretty
much suck. Don't get me wrong, I completely agree they are useful
tools, as borne out by the number of books that have been typeset
over the years using troff. But a word processor they DO NOT make.
> I strongly disagree that UNIX is overkill for any application.
> Why shouldn't the user be given a stable, flexible platform to do
> their work on? Especially if it is one that makes efficient use
> of the hardware the user has, so they needn't buy new hardware
> every six months?
They should, but you certainly don't need UNIX to do this. See,
for instance, a PalmPilot, or even a WinCE H/Pro. You sure as
hell don't need UNIX to run your car stereo or your sparkplugs.
There is a time and a place for everything. I think we agree that
the time and place for Windows is/was "in the garbage can, in
mid-August 1995. ;^)
It is (of course) true that MOST of the embedded operating systems
available these days are rather UNIX-like, either in their internal
structure or at least in their API model. This is a sure sign that
the original UNIX model was a very good model for providing services
to programmers. But UNIX systems, even stripped down ones, still
make a lot of assumptions about what a computer is that are terribly
unnecessary to a large range of applications.
> One of the machines I run -CURRENT on is a 4
> year-old Pentium. Other than build times being longer than I would
> like, I don't have noticable performance issues. The same machine
> is essentially unable to run NT, and do work at the same time.
But as a word processor, is it really any better than MacWrite on an
original Mac 128K? Or, to stack the deck a little more, a Mac Plus?
*I* don't think so. That was a system well suited to word processing,
except the tiny screen. Nothing since then has advanced the state of
the art in word processing, only in being able to do other things with
your word processor.
> {1} Anyone need a copy of the UNIX system V Release 2 User and Programmer
> Reference Manuals?
No thanks, I have the full, 5-volume set from CBS College Publications.
I still use it when I need to look up troff or nroff information. ;^)
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
http://www.softweyr.com/~softweyr wes@softweyr.com
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