Your flame about Unix philosophy...right on target.

[mrose.uci%rand-relay at sri-unix.UUCP]

From:  Marshall Rose <mrose.uci at rand-relay>

Grrr -

    Your message was so hot that my terminal almost caught on fire.  As
    it was, it took me 5 minutes to decide if I should reply to you,
    and another 10 to cool-off before doing so.  Here goes.

    I'd rather not bog down Unix-Wizards at this point in time with a
    lengthy emotion-packed discussion of why operating system X is
    better/worse that UNIX.  Although I'm interested in comparing UNIX
    to other systems, it seems lately that Unix-Wizards has been
    getting a stream of messages about things which have been discussed
    time and time again.  Unfortunately, no one is saying anything new.
    I find this pretty irritating, because this list is an invaluable
    source of information, and I don't like it when my threshing yields
    mostly chaff with little grain (even when I'm using a powerful mail
    handler to grind my mail).

    We're running 4.1a BSD UNIX on a couple of 750s, and I think its
    great.  Sure we have problems on occasion, and yes UCB doesn't
    answer their phone (and UCI is a UC!).  Despite this, (in my
    opinion) 4.1a leaves most other operating systems in the dust. If
    these other systems, which lack "a certain sexy user interface",
    are so hot, then let them give users more than UNIX gives them.  As
    far as I'm concerned, put up or shut up!  If someone has something
    better, then people will stop using UNIX and starting using
    whatever it is that's better.  

    Yes, BSD UNIX has its problems, but frankly, I'm grateful.  I can't
    imagine what computing would be (for me at least) like without
    UNIX.

/mtr