TOPS-20 --> UNIX

[dm%bbn-unix at sri-unix.UUCP]

From:  Dave Mankins <dm at bbn-unix>


I worked for a couple of years on TOPS-20 and its predecessor
TENEX before moving to UNIX.  I found UNIX to lead to a large
increase in my productivity almost immediately.  The big thing
that TENEX lacked that UNIX has is pipes and all the programs on
UNIX know how to use them--I spent a long time trying to teach a
large application program I was using to take it's input from
another process (since that time the application has been moved
off of TENEX and onto UNIX), and never really succeeded.  That
comes for free on UNIX.

Of course, we cheated at BBN and rewrote the terminal driver to
allow wakeup-sets and stop-at-the-bottom-of-the-page mode,
CRT-oriented erasing, etc. (this was back in the days of V6).
(Pipe everything through MORE? gag.  Build MORE into readnews and
news and the mail-reading program? double-gag.)

When my TOPS-20/TENEX friends ask me why I prefer UNIX, I tell
them about a 25-LINE LONG SHELL file I once wrote in about an
hour (I made lots of refinements) which goes and gets the past
few day's messages off of MIT-AI's bulletin board (running FTP
from a pipe, using AWK to generate FTP's command-input) and puts
them into uniquely-name files in a scratch directory, so I can
look at them at my leisure. 

How long do you think it would take to write a similar program on
TOPS-20?  I'd guess probably two or three days of very heavy
MACRO-10 hacking...Of course you'd probably never undertake the
task in the first place since it would seem so daunting. 

But it's true that there are lots of lessons that UNIX could
learn about paging, process-control, user-interface,
documentations, etc., etc., from TENEX, and MULTICS.  I was
struck by the initial responses to Scott Cooper's (?) article
("How long are we going to put up with this crap?"). 

The responses I mean are the ones of the "Oh, yeah?  Well name an
operating system that's better!"

About the ONLY operating system I've ever used with a worse user
interface and which was more poorly-documented than UNIX was
MIT's ITS system, which was abysmal in both those respects.  Come
on, folks, is UNIX the first "commercial-grade" operating system
you've ever used?  (ITS is by no means commercial-grade.)

There are some really neat ideas out there in OS land.  Don't
think UNIX has it all.  Look around a little.