AT&T Joining OSF

[Scott Barman]

Before I begin, I am not commenting on Mr. Kramer's posting itself.  I am
just using it as a platform to comment on the state of Unix in general.
Also note:  I have been trying to get this posted for a few weeks now, but
some problems prevented it!  :-)

In article <5796 at orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>, kramerj at beasley.CS.ORST.EDU (Jack Kramer - OSU Gene Res) writes:
> In article <5960008 at hpcupt1.HP.COM> kluft at hpcupt1.HP.COM (Ian Kluft) writes:
> >rogers at ofc.Columbia.NCR.COM (H. L. Rogers) writes:
> >> Does AT&T membership give respectability to the OSF crowd?
> >
> >Actually, it was AT&T and Sun who were lacking in respectability after
> >trying to steal the whole market for themselves.
> >
> AT&T and Sun trying to steal UNIX?  How much did OSF members such as IBM,
> DEC and Apollo spend over the last 15 years to get UNIX where it is
> today?  But I guess UNIX does need to be brought up to date.  When will
And how much has AT&T (not the Bell Labs people) done to Unix over the
last 15 years?  Up until five or six years ago, NOTHING!  Then, when they
decided that they wanted to make it a *real* product, they took the thing
and bastardized it sooooo much that I remember the times I cursed AT&T up
the ioctl system call and down utmp structure while porting software from
The Seventh Edition of Unix to System V Release 2.

And it continues!

Unix, as it stands today, has problems since it does not seem that (maybe
up until now) AT&T has ever had a real direction for its growth.  It
is inflicted with a disease called "creeping featurism" where the
simplicity of Unix tools have been mucked with more junk then they need
(don't laugh you BSD people, 4.[23]bsd just wreaks with this problem as
well).  And the kernel?!  Why must everything be burried in the kernel?
Why must we have kernels with text regions of over 256K?  Why must we
have facilites that do not conform with Unix's original idea of accessing
them as a file (see sockets, semaphores, message queues, etc.)?  And why
must confusing and nonsensical functionality be added where it is really
not needed (see System V's init)?

Enough already!

The original appeal of Unix was how simple ideas can be put together in a
simple, logical manner to produce the desired results.  Tools were
created to do simple tasks.  With these tools we were able to accomplish
most goals and the ones we could not accomplish, we just wrote another
tool to do the work.  Now we have programs that will reformat our source
files putting tabs, etc. in the right places, shells with half the world
built into them, and two different versions of a screen handling package
for dumb tubes that are not compatible with each other (no comments here
on windowing packages since they are too new and and "standards" have really
not been set).

And there is more to come!

With AT&T and Sun *playing* with Unix, no doubt there will be an
extension to all programs--more creeping featurisms--that will give us
things like a pr that will do everything but load the paper for you and
system calls for virtual memory mechanisms that should be hidden from the
general user anyway.  I am not forgetting about the OSF people whose
chief supporters, IBM and DEC, have not written "small" system since
they were limited to 64K of memeory.  (Isn't Open Software Foundation an
oxymoron when mentioned in the same sentence with IBM and DEC?)

When will it end?

HA!  Never, probably, since everyone wants to keep adding more and more
to it.  Maybe it will buckle under its own weight, I don't know.  But I
think that if Unix is to survive it needs a mass cleanup to go *back* to
its original idea of "small is beautiful" and get some of the junk out of
it (e.g. if you have streams, then why is there a tty "driver", see
Dennis Ritchie's paper for better explanations).  If this doesn't happen
I see Unix running into the same memory and storage problems that is
going to doom OS/2.  I can only hope that those involved will hear this
lonely voice in the crowd (probably a minority opinion) and just consider
the consequeces as Unix grows to consume all available resources.

I will get off my soapbox now and begin to line the mailbox with asbestos
(again) since I can hear them flames-a-commin'!  :-)

-- 
scott barman		..!gatech!dtscp1!scott
Digital Transmissions Systems, Inc.
Duluth, Georgia