Foreword
By Donald A. Norman
The UNIX-HATERS Handbook? Why? Of what earthly good could it be?
Who is the audience? What a perverted idea.
But then again, I have been sitting here in my living room—still wearing
my coat—for over an hour now, reading the manuscript. One and one-half
hours. What a strange book. But appealing. Two hours. OK, I give up: I
like it. It’s a perverse book, but it has an equally perverse appeal. Who
would have thought it: Unix, the hacker’s pornography.
When this particular rock-throwing rabble invited me to join them, I
thought back to my own classic paper on the subject, so classic it even got
reprinted in a book of readings. But it isn’t even referenced in this one.
Well, I’ll fix that:
Norman, D. A. The Trouble with Unix: The User Interface is Horrid.
Datamation, 27 (12) 1981, November. pp. 139-150. Reprinted in
Pylyshyn, Z. W., & Bannon, L. J., eds. Perspectives on the Computer
Revolution, 2nd revised edition, Hillsdale, NJ, Ablex, 1989.What is this horrible fascination with Unix? The operating system of the
1960s, still gaining in popularity in the 1990s. A horrible system, except
that all the other commercial offerings are even worse. The only operating
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Copyright 1994 by Donald A. Norman. Printed with permission.