Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!cadeta!dtscp1!scott From: scott@dtscp1.UUCP (Scott Barman) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: AT&T Joining OSF Message-ID: <313@dtscp1.UUCP> Date: 30 Jul 88 02:01:33 GMT References: <10474@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <5960008@hpcupt1.HP.COM> <5796@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> Organization: Digital Transmission Systems - Atlanta GA Lines: 81 Before I begin, I am not commenting on Mr. Kramer's posting itself. I am just using it as a platform to comment on the state of Unix in general. Also note: I have been trying to get this posted for a few weeks now, but some problems prevented it! :-) In article <5796@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>, kramerj@beasley.CS.ORST.EDU (Jack Kramer - OSU Gene Res) writes: > In article <5960008@hpcupt1.HP.COM> kluft@hpcupt1.HP.COM (Ian Kluft) writes: > >rogers@ofc.Columbia.NCR.COM (H. L. Rogers) writes: > >> Does AT&T membership give respectability to the OSF crowd? > > > >Actually, it was AT&T and Sun who were lacking in respectability after > >trying to steal the whole market for themselves. > > > AT&T and Sun trying to steal UNIX? How much did OSF members such as IBM, > DEC and Apollo spend over the last 15 years to get UNIX where it is > today? But I guess UNIX does need to be brought up to date. When will And how much has AT&T (not the Bell Labs people) done to Unix over the last 15 years? Up until five or six years ago, NOTHING! Then, when they decided that they wanted to make it a *real* product, they took the thing and bastardized it sooooo much that I remember the times I cursed AT&T up the ioctl system call and down utmp structure while porting software from The Seventh Edition of Unix to System V Release 2. And it continues! Unix, as it stands today, has problems since it does not seem that (maybe up until now) AT&T has ever had a real direction for its growth. It is inflicted with a disease called "creeping featurism" where the simplicity of Unix tools have been mucked with more junk then they need (don't laugh you BSD people, 4.[23]bsd just wreaks with this problem as well). And the kernel?! Why must everything be burried in the kernel? Why must we have kernels with text regions of over 256K? Why must we have facilites that do not conform with Unix's original idea of accessing them as a file (see sockets, semaphores, message queues, etc.)? And why must confusing and nonsensical functionality be added where it is really not needed (see System V's init)? Enough already! The original appeal of Unix was how simple ideas can be put together in a simple, logical manner to produce the desired results. Tools were created to do simple tasks. With these tools we were able to accomplish most goals and the ones we could not accomplish, we just wrote another tool to do the work. Now we have programs that will reformat our source files putting tabs, etc. in the right places, shells with half the world built into them, and two different versions of a screen handling package for dumb tubes that are not compatible with each other (no comments here on windowing packages since they are too new and and "standards" have really not been set). And there is more to come! With AT&T and Sun *playing* with Unix, no doubt there will be an extension to all programs--more creeping featurisms--that will give us things like a pr that will do everything but load the paper for you and system calls for virtual memory mechanisms that should be hidden from the general user anyway. I am not forgetting about the OSF people whose chief supporters, IBM and DEC, have not written "small" system since they were limited to 64K of memeory. (Isn't Open Software Foundation an oxymoron when mentioned in the same sentence with IBM and DEC?) When will it end? HA! Never, probably, since everyone wants to keep adding more and more to it. Maybe it will buckle under its own weight, I don't know. But I think that if Unix is to survive it needs a mass cleanup to go *back* to its original idea of "small is beautiful" and get some of the junk out of it (e.g. if you have streams, then why is there a tty "driver", see Dennis Ritchie's paper for better explanations). If this doesn't happen I see Unix running into the same memory and storage problems that is going to doom OS/2. I can only hope that those involved will hear this lonely voice in the crowd (probably a minority opinion) and just consider the consequeces as Unix grows to consume all available resources. I will get off my soapbox now and begin to line the mailbox with asbestos (again) since I can hear them flames-a-commin'! :-) -- scott barman ..!gatech!dtscp1!scott Digital Transmissions Systems, Inc. Duluth, Georgia