ugh.book

6 Unix

Literature avers that Unix succeeded because of its technical superiority.

This is not true. Unix was evolutionarily superior to its competitors, but

not technically superior. Unix became a commercial success because it

was a virus. Its sole evolutionary advantage was its small size, simple

design, and resulting portability. Later it became popular and commercially

successful because it piggy-backed on three very successful hosts: the

PDP-11, the VAX, and Sun workstations. (The Sun was in fact designed to

be a virus vector.)

As one DEC employee put it:

From: CLOSET::E::PETER 29-SEP-1989 09:43:26.63

To: closet::t_parmenter

Subj: Unix

In a previous job selling Lisp Machines, I was often asked about

Unix. If the audience was not mixed gender, I would sometimes

compare Unix to herpes—lots of people have it, nobody wants it,

they got screwed when they got it, and if they could, they would get

rid of it. There would be smiles, heads would nod, and that would

usually end the discussion about Unix.

Of the at least 20 commercial workstation manufacturers that sprouted or

already existed at the time (late 1970s to early 1980s), only a handful—

Digital, Apollo, Symbolics, HP—resisted Unix. By 1993, Symbolics was

in Chapter 11 and Apollo had been purchased (by HP). The remaining

companies are now firmly committed to Unix.

Accumulation of Random Genetic Material

Chromosomes accumulate random genetic material; this material gets hap-

pily and haphazardly copied and passed down the generations. Once the

human genome is fully mapped, we may discover that only a few percent

of it actually describes functioning humans; the rest describes orangutans,

new mutants, televangelists, and used computer sellers.

The same is true of Unix. Despite its small beginnings, Unix accumulated

junk genomes at a tremendous pace. For example, it’s hard to find a ver-

sion of Unix that doesn’t contain drivers for a Linotronic or Imagen type-

setter, even though few Unix users even know what these machines look

like. As Olin Shivers observes, the original evolutionary pressures on Unix

have been relaxed, and the strain has gone wild.