Favorite operating systems query

[guy at sun.UUCP]

A lot of the other complaints have already been shown not to be grounded in
reality, so I won't bother adding more logs to the first....

> 7) IPC. Shared memory, sockets, pty's, pipes, ioctls all over the place.
>    And the only one that's not been hacked in as an after thought is pipes.

Well, "hacked in as an afterthought" is a low-content (if not no-content)
phrase; it could be interpreted as "anything not in First Edition UNIX was
'hacked in as an afterthought'", or "anything not put in at Research was
'hacked in as an afterthought'".  Yes, there are problems with the various
flavors of UNIX IPC, but they do get the job done; saying

> IPC in Unix bytes the giant weenie.

is somewhat extreme.

> 9) Related to (7), networking support.  Sockets are gross.  This isn't just
>    my opinion, ask the DoD what they think of sockets.

OK, how are sockets gross?  How does the DOD think sockets are gross?  Is it
"sockets" they don't like, or perhaps the 4.2BSD TCP/IP implementation?
Blaming sockets for the latter is like blaming C for the inadequacies of
UNIX.

> OK, now that I've got all the fanatics foaming at the mouth, let me throw
> in my disclaimer.  I've been a Unix fanatic myself for the past 4 years.

It's interesting to note that another poster gave a long list of what they
didn't like about VMS and liked about UNIX, and then said that VMS was their
favorite system.

> Read net.mail - every time the postmaster at some large site leaves his job
> the mail gets all fouled up.  What happened to programs that run themselves,
> without being nursed?

It's not clear this is UNIX's fault.  There are programs which run under
UNIX which "run themselves".  There are programs (including, I suspect, some
mail systems) running under other operating systems which don't.

> Unix has too much folklore & guru-ness about it to be accepted into the
> mainstream.

I don't think this is intrinsic to UNIX.

I suspect (especially given that a UNIX hacker gave a long list of what they
saw as problems with UNIX, and that at least one VMS hacker gave a long list
of what they saw as problems with VMS) that in many cases "favorite
operating system" is equivalent to "first operating system that a person
learned in depth", and that the question of which OSes are good and which
are bad isn't very black-and-white.  Much the same is true of editors,
programming languages, etc..
-- 
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy at sun.com (or guy at sun.arpa)