xxviii Preface
lence as givens, and, as ancient shamans did, display their wounds, some
self-inflicted, as proof of their power and wizardry. We aim, through blunt-
ness and humor, to show them that they pray to a tin god, and that science,
not religion, is the path to useful and friendly technology.Computer science would have progressed much further and faster if all of
the time and effort that has been spent maintaining and nurturing Unix had
been spent on a sounder operating system. We hope that one day Unix will
be relinquished to the history books and museums of computer science as
an interesting, albeit costly, footnote.Contributors and Acknowledgments
To write this book, the editors culled through six years’ archives of the
UNIX-HATERS mailing list. These contributors are referenced in each
included message and are indexed in the rear of the volume. Around these
messages are chapters written by UNIX-HATERS experts who felt com-
pelled to contribute to this exposé. We are:Simson Garfinkel, a journalist and computer science researcher. Simson
received three undergraduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and a Master’s degree in journalism from Columbia Univer-
sity. He would be in graduate school working on his Ph.D. now, but this
book came up and it seemed like more fun. Simson is also the co-author of
Practical Unix Security (O’Reilly and Associates, 1991) and NeXTSTEP
Programming (Springer-Verlag, 1993). In addition to his duties as editor,
Simson wrote the chapters on Documentation, the Unix File System, Net-
working, and Security.Daniel Weise, a researcher at Microsoft’s research laboratory. Daniel
received his Ph.D. and Master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and was an assistant
professor at Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering
until deciding to enter the real world of DOS and Windows. While at his
cushy academic job, Daniel had time to work on this project. Since leaving
Stanford for the rainy shores of Lake Washington, a challenging new job
and a bouncing, crawling, active baby boy have become his priorities. In
addition to initial editing, Daniel wrote large portions of Welcome, New
User; Mail; and Terminal Insanity.Steven Strassmann, a senior scientist at Apple Computer. Steven received
his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Labora-