Your flame about Unix philosophy...r - (nf)

[preece at uicsl.UUCP]

#R:sri-arpa:-1195700:uicsl:12500012:000:1256
uicsl!preece    Sep 28 08:51:00 1983

	Hear now, what are you complaining about? Don't you enjoy using a
	system that is buggy, flaky, and downright unreliable? Doesn't your
	heart just go pitty-pat at the prospect of digging into the kernel
	code for the answer to yet another annoying "problem" (read that as
	Undocumented Feature and/or Restriction)?
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I don't know what systems you've been using, but our Vax with Unix is MUCH
more reliable than the Dec10 that preceded it. I'm reasonably sure it is
up more of the time than the university's Cyber and IBM systems. I was
worried about reliability before we replaced our 10 and I've been very
pleased with the reliability of the system.

I'm grateful for the ability to dig into the kernel when I don't understand
why something isn't doing what I expect it to. On the IBM systems I've
worked on that kind of knowledge was passed down as folklore from the
people who had been there longest. The Cyber I don't even want to
talk about.

Unix is far from perfect, especially with respect to documentation, but
it's far and away the most friendly system I've used and the most
understandable. (Well, DTSS was pretty understandable, at least when I was
using it, but it was rather limited, too.)

scott preece
pur-ee!uiucdcs!uicsl!preece