xviiand did the other thing that made Unix so very successful: give it away to
all the universities of the world.
I have to admit to a deep love-hate relationship with Unix. Much though I
try to escape it, it keeps following me. And I truly do miss the ability (actu-
ally, the necessity) to write long, exotic command strings, with mysterious,
inconsistent flag settings, pipes, filters, and redirections. The continuing
popularity of Unix remains a great puzzle, even though we all know that it
is not the best technology that necessarily wins the battle. I’m tempted to
say that the authors of this book share a similar love-hate relationship, but
when I tried to say so (in a draft of this foreword), I got shot down:
“Sure, we love your foreword,” they told me, but “The only truly irksome
part is the ‘c’mon, you really love it.’ No. Really. We really do hate it. And
don’t give me that ‘you deny it—y’see, that proves it’ stuff.”
I remain suspicious: would anyone have spent this much time and effort
writing about how much they hated Unix if they didn’t secretly love it? I’ll
leave that to the readers to judge, but in the end, it really doesn’t matter: If
this book doesn’t kill Unix, nothing will.
As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more
SED scripts. Just a simple, elegant life: “Your application has unexpect-
edly quit due to error number –1. OK?”
Donald A. Norman
Apple Fellow
Apple Computer, Inc.
And while I’m at it:
Professor of Cognitive Science, Emeritus
University of California, San Diego