Unix dead??? (long message)

[Mark Crispin]

    The following is from the August '86 issue of the DEC
Professional.  It's amusing, if nothing else.  I believe Dvorak
is a VMS/IBM PC junkie.

                  UNIX IS DEAD!  WANNA FIGHT??
                         John C. Dvorak

     Summer is over and a plague of UNIX programmers is upon us.
College kids, wet behind the ears; greenhorns, rubes.  They pour
out of various campuses talking about ROFF and ED and pipes and
paths, and they look for work.  They're impressed with
themselves.  After all, they've learned the language of a secret
society.  If they're from Berkeley, they've learned the secret
language of a secret society.

     They all program in C, and wherever they go they change the
prompts on whatever computer they get their hands on so it
resembles a UNIX machine.  They creative ones go into whatever
operating system they have to use and find a symbol or token
table; then they change the commands to look like UNIX.  The
*more* creative ones customize the commands further so they are
even more cryptic and weird than UNIX.  Whether these people ever
do any real work is a mystery.

     "Yes, weeell, to list my files I merely type P; MJOI."

     "P; MJOI??  What they heck does that mean?"

     "It just so happens that if I put my coffee cup on the
keyboard and rock it a certain way, that's what it will type; so,
I do that to list my files!"

     While it's good to see these kids doing something other than
wasting quarters on endless games of Pole Position, I'm not so
sure UNIX dabbling is much better for society.

     I feel this way, not so much because UNIX is an
old-fashioned OS that has a special place reserved in hell, but
because its time has passed.  UNIX is dead, but no one bothered
to claim the body.  It lives like a zombie on college computers
and serves as a gateway to all sorts of weird networks.

     UNIX haunts marketing men, too.  I remember when Fortune
Systems was getting started.  That's about the time that a bumper
crop of college-bred UNIX drones was dumped like mulch into the
marketplace.  They all were singing the praises of UNIX to the
low end of the market.

     So, I went to this strategy demonstration given by one of
the vice presidents of Fortune Systems.  These guys surely were
ahead of their time, and it was a perfect example of having too
much bad information.  The Fortune 16:32 (or was it 32:16?  In
either case it looked like a biblical reference...) said unto us:
"Come to me for thine microprocessor and spend, spend, spend!"
it was the first camel of microcomputers.  Like a horse designed
by committee (aka camel), the Fortune was preceded by too much
market research.  A lot of this was skewed by the hordes of UNIX
maniacs running through the valley waving the UNIX flag.

     First of all, I was shown a slide that clearly showed the
Motorola 68000 as the world's greatest microprocessor.

     The 68000 beat everything.  Personally, I can't remember
what it was pitted against -- probably the 8080, the 6502 and a
4004.  Whatever, this was the chip to use.

     Then the company did some market research and, because
writers, pundits, researchers, secretaries, publishers, and
programmers all said that UNIX was the next hot operating system,
they chose it for their own little machine.

     The UNIX community yelled, "Yea!"  But, they continued to
use free university-provided time, and none of the UNIX hackers
bought the little UNIX boxes.  Well, that was okay, it was
intended to be a business machine, anyway.

     Ooops!  Gee, it seems that the businessmen couldn't cope
with UNIX and "$ ls /bin/pr -p -t" or any other such nonsense.
So they had to build a performance-sapping shell around the
system, code name: SLOW.  So much for the UNIX world takeover.  I
figured that would be the last I heard of it.

     No so.  Last week, a guy walked up to me as I was writing
this column on a portable computer in a San Francisco bistro.  he
had been reading it through binoculars from across the room.
"So, you don't like UNIX, huh, Dvorak?  What's better, MS-DOS??
Hahahaha!"

     "IBM's VM is the happening operating system," was my quick
rejoinder.

     "VM doesn't run on minis and micros.  It's just a shell,
anyway," he shot back.

     "Is not!"

     "Is too!"

     "Is not!"

     He took a swing at me and I caught him a good one in the
stomach.  We punched each other for a good 15 minutes.  All of a
sudden he stopped and yelled,

     "Hey, what's going on here?  Where am I?  Wow, I remember my
name!  What happened?"

     "We were fighting about UNIX," I said.

     "UNIX?  I was fighting about UNIX?  My God...I was
hypnotized!"

     True story.

     So, try snapping your fingers in the face of one of these
UNIX maniacs next time he flies off the handle.

     See what happens.
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