18 Welcome, New User!
When Unix was under construction, it hosted no guests. Every visitor was a
contractor who was given a hard hat and pointed at some unfinished part of
the barracks. Unfortunately, not only were human factors engineers never
invited to work on the structure, their need was never anticipated or
planned. Thus, many standard amenities, like flush toilets, central heating,
and windows that open, are now extremely hard and expensive to retrofit
into the structure. Nonetheless builders still marvel at its design, so much
so that they don’t mind sleeping on the floor in rooms with no smoke
detectors.For most of its history, Unix was the research vehicle for university and
industrial researchers. With the explosion of cheap workstations, Unix has
entered a new era, that of the delivery platform. This change is easy to date:
it’s when workstation vendors unbundled their C compilers from their stan-
dard software suite to lower prices for nondevelopers. The fossil record is a
little unclear on the boundaries of this change, but it mostly occurred in- Thus, it’s only during the past few years that vendors have actually
cared about the needs and desires of end users, rather than programmers.
This explains why companies are now trying to write graphical user inter-
faces to “replace” the need for the shell. We don’t envy these companies
their task.
Cryptic Command Names
The novice Unix user is always surprised by Unix’s choice of command
names. No amount of training on DOS or the Mac prepares one for the
majestic beauty of cryptic two-letter command names such as cp, rm, and
ls.Those of us who used early 70s I/O devices suspect the degeneracy stems
from the speed, reliability, and, most importantly, the keyboard of the
ASR-33 Teletype, the common input/output device in those days. Unlike
today’s keyboards, where the distance keys travel is based on feedback
principles, and the only force necessary is that needed to close a
microswitch, keys on the Teletype (at least in memory) needed to travel
over half an inch, and take the force necessary to run a small electric gener-
ator such as those found on bicycles. You could break your knuckles touch
typing on those beasts.