Comments on Unix from the DEC-Professional

[Martin Minow]

This note summarizes an article in the current (Sept. 1983) issue of
the highly-recommended magazine, The Dec Professional.  In summarizing
the article, I have omitted many of the author's supporting arguments
and examples,  but emphasize that they are relevant and reasonable.
The author has over seven years systems programming experience and
has worked exculsively on UNIX systems for a major industrial firm
for three years.


		An Opinion:  UNIX Realities
		      by Henry Glover

1. UNIX is not a good base upon which to build an applications
environment.

UNIX is oriented towards text-processing.  The file system has
no record-access system, no keyed or indexed files.  These are
supplied only through add-on packages from second vendors.

It is basically a one-language system, targeted for the support
of development of C language programs.  All other uses, like
Fortran-77 programming, are supported grudgingly if at all.

Layered products, such as forms management packages, or dbms
must be acquired from outside vendors, forcing a problem in
support.

2.  With UNIX, you always get a UNIX person.

In every UNIX installation there seems to be a resident person
who knows all about UNIX.  The UNIXperson usually arrives at
the employer's door bearing software which has been acquired from
other UNIXpeople, a favorite editor, shell, or backup utility.
These then replace the system's own utilities.  This leads to
reality 3.

3.  No two UNIX systems look alike.

UNIX is supposed to be the standard operating systems for small
computers.  If no two systems look alike, what are we to use as
the reference for standardization.

4.  UNIX breaks.

In order to optimize the performance of UNIX, its developers decided
to cache disk blocks in memory, periodically writing them to the
disk.  This caching has the desired effect, with an attendant
undesirable side-effect:  when the system crashes (or power-fails),
the file system gets corrupted.  The UNIX utilities have tools for
repairing such corruptions, and UNIXpeople are expert in using such
tools.

5.  UNIX is user-unfriendly

UNIX was developed by programmers to be used by programmers for doing
things that programmers do most often: write programs.  This sort of
user community does not need tutorial manuals, prompts, help facilities,
explanatory error messages, and the like.  They want succinct, quick
communications.

The UNIX manuals are terse to the extreme of being almost useless
unless you've already read and internalized them -- and then why
do you need a manual anyway?

A certain consistency is always nice when using utility programs;
some way to designate inputs, outputs, and options.  Inputs and
outputs are not usually a problem with UNIX unless there is more
than one of either.  When this happens, no two utilities have the
same command line convention for designating these things.

6.  UNIX look-alikes usually don't.

When we discuss UNIX look-alikes, we first have to decide what it is
that they're trying to mimic.  Is it the shell, the utilities, and
the commands.  Is it the C language system calls?  Or something more?
Oh, by the way, which version of UNIX do they try to look like?

If an operating system were truly UNIX compatible than utilities
and second-sourced software should run on all such systems without
translation.  This is not the case.

....

I am always suspicious of a system that is touted as the ultimate
system, one you can do everything on, one which is 'powerful',
'flexible', and teh latest and greatest -- 'portable'.  It seems to
me that no system could do all these things well.  But UNIX must be
good for something -- but what?


Transcribed and edited by

Martin Minow
decvax!minow