ugh.book

History of the Plague 7

Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 08:31:33 EDT

From: Olin Shivers <[email protected]>

To: UNIX-HATERS

Subject: Unix evolution

I was giving some thought to the general evolution (I use the term

loosely, here) of Unix since its inception at Bell Labs, and I think it

could be described as follows.

In the early PDP-11 days, Unix programs had the following design

parameters:

Rule 1. It didn’t have to be good, or even correct,

but:

Rule 2. It had to be small.

Thus the toolkit approach, and so forth.

Of course, over time, computer hardware has become progressively

more powerful: processors speed up, address spaces move from 16 to

32 bits, memory gets cheaper, and so forth.

So Rule 2 has been relaxed.

The additional genetic material continues to mutate as the virus spreads. It
really doesn’t matter how the genes got there; they are dutifully copied
from generation to generation, with second and third cousins resembling
each other about as much as Woody Allen resembles Michael Jordan. This
behavior has been noted in several books. For example, Section 15.3,
“Routing Information Protocol (RIP),” page 183, of an excellent book on
networking called Internetworking with TCP/IP by Douglas Comer,
describes how inferior genes survive and mutate in Unix’s network code
(paragraph 3):

Despite minor improvements over its predecessors, the popularity of

RIP as an IGP does not arise from its technical merits. Instead, it has

resulted because Berkeley distributed routed software along with

the popular 4.X BSD UNIX systems. Thus, many Internet sites

adopted and installed routed and started using RIP without even

considering its technical merits or limitations.

The next paragraph goes on to say: