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Comment by JdeBP | Hacker News Reader

Actually, M. Cutler's contempt for Unix design philosophy is not well documented. It's an unsupported edit to Wikipedia, and lots of recycling of that.

The subject came up on StackExchange recently, with someone asking for the meaning of the Wikipedia claim. No-one could find it actually documented. There's documentation of an incident where M. Cutler showed contempt for people who were connected to DEC Ultrix, calling them "sorry excuses for engineers". However the source for that is an anecdote, related in a book years later, told by one of the very people so addressed, who might have had an incentive to thumb xyr nose at M. Cutler.

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The book "Show-stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" (1994, G. Pascal Zachary) quotes: "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. 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."

(Why "M."?)

Now contrast with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/320402189 , the widely recycled Wikipedia edit and the claim that had to be explained; which that does not even support, let alone explain.

The Armando Stettner named in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/320396668 and other edits by the same person is the person who told the "sorry excuses for engineers" anecdote about xyrself, recorded in A Quarter Century of UNIX by Peter H. Salus.

The irony is that there is better, more specific, documentation of M. Cutler's opinion of OS/2 (specifically its mutex mechanism) than there is of M. Cutler's opinion of Unix.

> G. Pascal Zachary

I don't consider him a reliable source; he had a reputation for scandal mongering and misrepresentation.

I'd point out that at least one reference to Cutler and Unix in the book purports to be a direct quote from one of the team. If you're going to argue that he just made that quote up, I guess I can't argue with you of course.

> at least one reference to Cutler and Unix in the book purports to be a direct quote from one of the team

It could still be taken out of context, which was a common tactic of Zachary's when he wanted to misrepresent something. Or the team member the quote purports to be from could have been misunderstanding or misrepresenting or exaggerating Cutler's actual views, and Zachary could have picked that particular team member to quote from because it fit the narrative he was trying to construct, and ignored other team members who were saying different things.

For an example of Zachary's methods from the viewpoint of someone he interviewed and then misrepresented, see here:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_99.html

M. is a common abbreviation for "monsieur". Perhaps the GP speaks French?

> He thinks Unix is a junk operating program designed by a committee of Ph.D.s.

Posix is the junk operating system designed by committee, but given their advertising, I'm not surprised he would confuse the two.

Posix doesn't exist on its own in isolation.

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