{"id":390,"date":"2003-05-01T13:22:00","date_gmt":"2003-05-01T13:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/2019\/02\/20\/i-am-not-posting-this-to-promote-macs-rather-to-laugh-at-unix\/"},"modified":"2019-02-20T21:56:24","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T21:56:24","slug":"i-am-not-posting-this-to-promote-macs-rather-to-laugh-at-unix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/2003\/05\/01\/i-am-not-posting-this-to-promote-macs-rather-to-laugh-at-unix\/","title":{"rendered":"i am not posting this to promote macs – rather to laugh at UNIX"},"content":{"rendered":"

Foreword to The Unix Hater’s Handbook<\/a>
\nBy Donald A. Norman<\/p>\n

The UNIX-HATERS Handbook? Why? Of what earthly good could it be?
\nWho is the audience? What a perverted idea.<\/p>\n

But then again, I have been sitting here in my living room\u2014still wearing
\nmy coat\u2014for over an hour now, reading the manuscript. One and one-half
\nhours. What a strange book. But appealing. Two hours. OK, I give up: I
\nlike it. It\u2019s a perverse book, but it has an equally perverse appeal. Who
\nwould have thought it: Unix, the hacker\u2019s pornography.<\/p>\n

When this particular rock-throwing rabble invited me to join them, I
\nthought back to my own classic paper on the subject, so classic it even got
\nreprinted in a book of readings. But it isn\u2019t even referenced in this one.
\nWell, I\u2019ll fix that:<\/p>\n

Norman, D. A. The Trouble with Unix: The User Interface is Horrid.
\nDatamation, 27 (12) 1981, November. pp. 139-150. Reprinted in
\nPylyshyn, Z. W., & Bannon, L. J., eds. Perspectives on the Computer
\nRevolution, 2nd revised edition, Hillsdale, NJ, Ablex, 1989.<\/p>\n

What is this horrible fascination with Unix? The operating system of the
\n1960s, still gaining in popularity in the 1990s. A horrible system, except
\nthat all the other commercial offerings are even worse. The only operating
\nsystem that is so bad that people spend literally millions of dollars trying to
\nimprove it. Make it graphical (now that\u2019s an oxymoron, a graphical user
\ninterface for Unix).<\/p>\n

You know the real trouble with Unix? The real trouble is that it became so
\npopular. It wasn\u2019t meant to be popular. It was meant for a few folks working
\naway in their labs, using Digital Equipment Corporation\u2019s old PDP-11
\ncomputer. I used to have one of those. A comfortable, room-sized machine.
\nFast\u2014ran an instruction in roughly a microsecond. An elegant instruction
\nset (real programmers, you see, program in assembly code). Toggle
\nswitches on the front panel. Lights to show you what was in the registers.
\nYou didn\u2019t have to toggle in the boot program anymore, as you did with the
\nPDP-1 and PDP-4, but aside from that it was still a real computer. Not like
\nthose toys we have today that have no flashing lights, no register switches.
\nYou can\u2019t even single-step today\u2019s machines. They always run at full
\nspeed.<\/p>\n

The PDP-11 had 16,000 words of memory. That was a fantastic advance
\nover my PDP-4 that had 8,000. The Macintosh on which I type this has
\n64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there
\nwhen you have that much RAM? Unix was designed before the days of
\nCRT displays on the console. For many of us, the main input\/output device
\nwas a 10-character\/second, all uppercase teletype (advanced users had 30-
\ncharacter\/second teletypes, with upper- and lowercase, both). Equipped
\nwith a paper tape reader, I hasten to add. No, those were the real days of
\ncomputing. And those were the days of Unix. Look at Unix today: the remnants
\nare still there. Try logging in with all capitals. Many Unix systems
\nwill still switch to an all-caps mode. Weird.<\/p>\n

Unix was a programmer\u2019s delight. Simple, elegant underpinnings. The user
\ninterface was indeed horrible, but in those days, nobody cared about such
\nthings. As far as I know, I was the very first person to complain about it in
\nwriting (that infamous Unix article): my article got swiped from my computer,
\nbroadcast over UUCP-Net, and I got over 30 single-spaced pages of
\ntaunts and jibes in reply. I even got dragged to Bell Labs to stand up in
\nfront of an overfilled auditorium to defend myself. I survived. Worse, Unix
\nsurvived.<\/p>\n

Unix was designed for the computing environment of then, not the
\nmachines of today. Unix survives only because everyone else has done so
\nbadly. There were many valuable things to be learned from Unix: how
\ncome nobody learned them and then did better? Started from scratch and
\nproduced a really superior, modern, graphical operating system? Oh yeah,
\nand did the other thing that made Unix so very successful: give it away to
\nall the universities of the world.<\/p>\n

I have to admit to a deep love-hate relationship with Unix. Much though I
\ntry to escape it, it keeps following me. And I truly do miss the ability (actually,
\nthe necessity) to write long, exotic command strings, with mysterious,
\ninconsistent flag settings, pipes, filters, and redirections. The continuing
\npopularity of Unix remains a great puzzle, even though we all know that it
\nis not the best technology that necessarily wins the battle. I\u2019m tempted to
\nsay that the authors of this book share a similar love-hate relationship, but
\nwhen I tried to say so (in a draft of this foreword), I got shot down:
\n\u201cSure, we love your foreword,\u201d they told me, but \u201cThe only truly irksome
\npart is the \u2018c\u2019mon, you really love it.\u2019 No. Really. We really do hate it. And
\ndon\u2019t give me that \u2018you deny it\u2014y\u2019see, that proves it\u2019 stuff.<\/p>\n

I remain suspicious: would anyone have spent this much time and effort
\nwriting about how much they hated Unix if they didn\u2019t secretly love it? I\u2019ll
\nleave that to the readers to judge, but in the end, it really doesn\u2019t matter: If
\nthis book doesn\u2019t kill Unix, nothing will.<\/p>\n

As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more
\nSED scripts. Just a simple, elegant life:<\/p>\n

\u201cYour application has unexpectedly
\nquit due to error number \u20131. OK?\u201d<\/p>\n

Donald A. Norman
\nApple Fellow
\nApple Computer, Inc.
\nAnd while I\u2019m at it:
\nProfessor of Cognitive Science, Emeritus
\nUniversity of California, San Diego<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Foreword to The Unix Hater’s Handbook By Donald A. Norman The UNIX-HATERS Handbook? Why? Of what earthly good could it be? Who is the audience?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"chat","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-chat","hentry","tag-listless","post_format-post-format-chat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2963,"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390\/revisions\/2963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delascabezas.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}