Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

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I'm slightly too young to have lived through it myself, but from what my dad told me, pre-GNU Unix and post-GNU Unix are almost completely different in their user experience. Prior to GNU, Unix (the tools and the kernel) used to simply crash a lot, or drop data. It was not an especially good system in any regard.

As the GNU coding standards say:

> Avoid arbitrary limits on the length or number of any data structure, including file names, lines, files, and symbols, by allocating all data structures dynamically. In most Unix utilities, “long lines are silently truncated”. This is not acceptable in a GNU utility.

This never really clicked with me because I didn't live through a time when my primary Unix utilities weren't robust. The closest I got was using old (1990's) HP/UX and Solaris and AIX systems where the sysadmins had installed the GNU tools already. All I knew is that I shouldn't use the system tools, because they were worse.

Personally, I think what helped Unix succeed is that the implementations were bad but the architecture made it (mostly) possible to improve the implementations piecemeal. Accordingly, the parts that have had the most trouble improving (like X11, and C) are those where the design doesn't allow this.

Yes, using standard POSIX tools wasn't the best experience of the world.

What helped Unix succeed was that originally Bell Labs wasn't allowed to sell it, so they gave it to universities for what was a symbolic price in comparisasion what a standard OS used to cost, alongside its source code.

So naturally many stundents from those universities went out and started businesses based on UNIX, like Sun for example.

One of the reasons behing the BSD lawsuit was that AT&T got the license to charge for UNIX after Bell Labs was broken down into smaller units and they were trying to kill off those free branches.

People have a tendency to gravitate towards free stuff regarless how bad the quality happens to be.

Eh, what? At the time (1994) the handbook was written reasonably priced alternatives were MacOS and Windows, both of which froze all the time and had horrible programming environments.

AIX, non-free, was notoriously horrible, too.

And the Wirth systems that you promote here were actually free.

So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s?

Digital Research produced some nice usable systems in the early 80s. MP/M was a multitasking version of CP/M available by 1981.

In the mainframe world, TOPS-10/20 and VMS were both exemplary. From the user POV, the former was one of the best command-line systems ever created, with none of the insane user-hostility built into UNIX command naming. Dave "VMS -> NT" Cutler absolutely hated Unix, and it shows.

But we're really comparing cinder blocks and potatoes. UNIX was designed as a hobby/student hacker tool, not as a general user OS. Many of the design choices are bizarre and frankly stupid, as the book delights in pointing out. But hackers love UNIX because using it just it feels just like hacking code, and that's considered a good thing.

It wouldn't be impossible to design an OS with powerful command line options but a sensible command naming system, much more intelligent and reliable security, a modern filesystem, and so on - and perhaps add some of the user configurability and extendability of the Lisp/Smalltalk/Hypercard(?) world.

But UNIX is so embedded now it would be a purely academic exercise.

> But UNIX is so embedded now it would be a purely academic exercise

I guess I'm less pessimistic, because I don't think that's true. I think there are quite a few people like me who are fed up with the shit that exists today and really want a good alternative. I think we'd be willing to make quite a few sacrifices for something with a whole lot of potential.

What seems to be true is that there are very few people both capable of making that happen and bold enough to try to make it something people can actually use instead of just a toy academic project.

Do you blog much? I've been lurking here a lot and have seen your posts. Would be interested in long-form essays or the like on what you would like to see.

I blog a little under my actual name, but I'd rather not tie that to this identity lest it make me less willing to express my stupidest and least popular opinions here, which I feel need to be exposed to criticism so I can better judge their merit. There's a reason my handle is what it is.

OS/400 was also a very interesting and well designed system.

So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s?

OS/2 was pretty solid...

The OS/2 part was, the DOS/Win comparability later not so much.

Workplace Shell was so cool though.

Not sure what was bad about the DOS and Windows compatibility? OS/2 was frequently touted as "better DOS than DOS, better Windows than Windows" and it was generally true. You could multitask DOS apps (lots of people used this for running multi-line BBSes and so forth) and Win16 apps could crash without bringing down the whole system.

Of course OS/2 was later severely hampered by its inability to run Win32 apps, but that's another story.

Besides what others already replied, universities were "free"[1] to use AT&T UNIX V source code and BSD derived code until AT&T was allowed to go commercial with UNIX, and suing Berkeley university in the process.

In fact, GCC only got traction after Sun introduced the idea in the UNIX world of selling the developer tools instead of bundling them wiht the OS.

Back in 1994 the Wirth systems were mostly only available at ETHZ.

Had Linux not come up into the scene, with the ongoing BSD lawsuit, and the UNIX landscape would have looked much different nowadays.

[1] - "free" here meaning several factors cheaper than buying a VMS or OS/360 timesharing system for the university campus.

From reading it I recall it was less about contemporary alternatives (which all sucked), and more about how UNIX displaced better environments in the 70s/80s.

There were a number of Multics descendants in the minicomputer world. Data General had AOS/VS, and Prime had PrimeOS. They were commercial and they were stable. However, they were tied to proprietary, expensive hardware.

> People have a tendency to gravitate towards free stuff regarless how bad the quality happens to be.

Where does the MS operating system fit in here? Arguably the worst general-computing OS, but by far the most popular. For purpose of discussion, do you consider it free due to being widely pirated?

I'll say that the developer experience on Windows was excellent around the 1995-2005 timeframe. But the user experience was horrible, yet it remained an almost monopoly on the desktop.

It's "free" because the cost is built into the hardware---MS had licensing terms that made selling hardware without a license a poor choice. As a result, it was preinstalled and no one looked at any alternatives.

In the context of the GP's post, that is free. The user did not have to outlay any more money to acquire it.

It wasn't free: the user was forced to pay for it built-in to cost of the machine even if they intended to use a different OS. That's much worse than free.

Worst compared to what? Microsoft gained its original OS dominance with MS-DOS when the primary competitor was CP/M.

And for the post 2005 timeframe, I don’t see any alternatives for general purpose desktop operating systems. Can’t install macOS on a device, and while I use Linux systems a lot, I don’t think anyone really develops it for desktop usage. I did hear you can have variable refresh rate monitors in the next Ubuntu release, but no idea about power management and hardware video decoding and all that..

Obviously it’s great in a VM!

It was the OS for PCs, only geeks and some IT departments ever bothered updating their OSes.

Regular consumers just handle their computers like appliances, getting a new one with whatever OS it gets bundled with.

The monopoly worked both ways, any OEM was free to ditch Microsoft agreements, they just cared to improve their profits by getting into bed with Microsoft.

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