Attack of the Serious UNIX Community!!!

[allbery at ncoast.UUCP]

Quoted from <2810 at brl-smoke.ARPA> ["Unix dead??? (long message)"], by Crispin at SUMEX-AIM.arpa (Mark Crispin)...
+---------------
|     The following is from the August '86 issue of the DEC
| Professional.  It's amusing, if nothing else.  I believe Dvorak
| is a VMS/IBM PC junkie.
| 
|                   UNIX IS DEAD!  WANNA FIGHT??
|                          John C. Dvorak
| 
|      Summer is over and a plague of UNIX programmers is upon us.
+---------------
|      First of all, I was shown a slide that clearly showed the
| Motorola 68000 as the world's greatest microprocessor.
| 
|      The 68000 beat everything.  Personally, I can't remember
| what it was pitted against -- probably the 8080, the 6502 and a
| 4004.  Whatever, this was the chip to use.
+---------------
|      "We were fighting about UNIX," I said.
| 
|      "UNIX?  I was fighting about UNIX?  My God...I was
| hypnotized!"
| 
|      True story.
| 
|      So, try snapping your fingers in the face of one of these
| UNIX maniacs next time he flies off the handle.
| 
|      See what happens.
+---------------

Some of us have committed our lives to turning a certain research-born OS into
a viable business operating environment.  This, however, reeks of the same
kind of idiocy as the churches who consider FRP games to be devil's-games.
However, I won't throw in the towel just yet...

You may tell Mr. John Dvorak that (1) the 68000 is much better than the
alternatives (except for the ``upgraded'' 68000 yclept the 68020) --FACT;
and (2) Show me the VM hypervisor running on something other than an IBM 30xx
processor.  (If it exists, I'd be interested.  VM *does* have possibilities;
but it's not an OS, it's a hypervisor.  CMS is a piece of sh*t.  (I have
personal experience in this.  A bastard hybrid of CP/M and OS/360 we don't
need.  (CP/M on virtual punched cards?  Gaak!  It's as disgusting to use as it
sounds.)

I *do* admit that Unix has problems, however.  The major reason is that Unix
has been until recently a research OS; AT&T is slowly turning it into a
commercially-viable OS, and UCB isn't doing so at all.  Nevertheless, it is
quite capable of being a commercial OS if the proper work is done for it.  (I
don't mean UNaXcess.  I *do* know the difference between a BBS and a shell.)
It is possible to present Unix's filesystem as something familiar to the
business user, and also possible to hide the ``strange names'' by means of
shell scripts, sh functions, C-shell aliases (most Unix resellers provide the
2.9BSD C-shell), etc.  (I have, in fact, *two* ways to present Unix.  One has
the advantage that it uses Unix's directory structure to emulate for free some
rather expensive programs available for MS-DOS; it's the basis for the shell
I'm writing.)

If Mr. Dvorak isn't reading the net, someone forward this to him.  He may get
an eye-opener or two; but I doubt it, as he sounds just as religious as the
Unix users he describes.  (I haven't seen any of that breed yet.  I daresay
they exist, but I'm not interested in a minority of idiots.)

++Brandon
-- 
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