Accusing Bell of NIH (formerly Re: useless digest reference)

[Geoff Kuenning]

In article <311 at baylor.UUCP> peter at baylor.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:

>There's no commercial reason for changing the name of Mail to mailx, or
>TURNING OFF the use of '.' as well as '~.' to terminate a message, or
>rehacking the terminal driver so V7
>programs no longer work, and so on.

(1) Differentiating programs (or variable names) by capitalizing the word
(and not even the *whole* word!) is at best bad human engineering, and at
worst sheer idiocy.  Is it any wonder Bell chose to do it a bit better,
especially now that experience has had a chance to prove Berkeley's decision
wrong?

(2) Count on Berkeley to provide two ways of doing things when one would do.
'~.' is a standard exit for a lot of programs (e.g., cu, tip), as is '.'.
Providing options confuses people without adding significant functionality.

(3) The USG TTY driver is a clean, orthogonal design that is easy to get to
do what you want.  You've never seen a posting of "how do I get an 8-bit
data path with ^S/^Q flow control" (needed for many laser printers) for USG
because it's so easy.  Sometimes you have to bite the bullet for the future.

> Like it or no, at the time Bell came
>out with System III, THE standard system in the real world was V7.

THE standard system in the educational world was V7.  The standard system
in the rest of the world was RSX, or TOPS-20, or OS/370.

>There
>is no good excuse for making SIII incompatible with V7.

Untrue.  There are frequently excellent COMMERCIAL reasons to drop
compatibility or at least reduce it in the interests of making use of what
one has learned.  (PDP-8?  What's that?)

>Or for
>making SV incompatible with SIII.

They didn't.
-- 

	Geoff Kuenning
	...!ihnp4!trwrb!desint!geoff