xvi Foreword
system that is so bad that people spend literally millions of dollars trying to
improve it. Make it graphical (now that’s an oxymoron, a graphical user
interface for Unix).You know the real trouble with Unix? The real trouble is that it became so
popular. It wasn’t meant to be popular. It was meant for a few folks work-
ing away in their labs, using Digital Equipment Corporation’s old PDP-
computer. I used to have one of those. A comfortable, room-sized machine.
Fast—ran an instruction in roughly a microsecond. An elegant instruction
set (real programmers, you see, program in assembly code). Toggle
switches on the front panel. Lights to show you what was in the registers.
You didn’t have to toggle in the boot program anymore, as you did with the
PDP-1 and PDP-4, but aside from that it was still a real computer. Not like
those toys we have today that have no flashing lights, no register switches.
You can’t even single-step today’s machines. They always run at full
speed.The PDP-11 had 16,000 words of memory. That was a fantastic advance
over my PDP-4 that had 8,000. The Macintosh on which I type this has
64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there
when you have that much RAM? Unix was designed before the days of
CRT displays on the console. For many of us, the main input/output device
was a 10-character/second, all uppercase teletype (advanced users had 30-
character/second teletypes, with upper- and lowercase, both). Equipped
with a paper tape reader, I hasten to add. No, those were the real days of
computing. And those were the days of Unix. Look at Unix today: the rem-
nants are still there. Try logging in with all capitals. Many Unix systems
will still switch to an all-caps mode. Weird.Unix was a programmer’s delight. Simple, elegant underpinnings. The user
interface was indeed horrible, but in those days, nobody cared about such
things. As far as I know, I was the very first person to complain about it in
writing (that infamous Unix article): my article got swiped from my com-
puter, broadcast over UUCP-Net, and I got over 30 single-spaced pages of
taunts and jibes in reply. I even got dragged to Bell Labs to stand up in
front of an overfilled auditorium to defend myself. I survived. Worse, Unix
survived.Unix was designed for the computing environment of then, not the
machines of today. Unix survives only because everyone else has done so
badly. There were many valuable things to be learned from Unix: how
come nobody learned them and then did better? Started from scratch and
produced a really superior, modern, graphical operating system? Oh yeah,