Unix, Unixpeople, Usenix - from a non-compunerd's point of view...

[Don E. Davis]

In article <97 at tekadg.UUCP> davidl at tekadg.UUCP (Dave) writes:
>
>Unfortunately, despite its undesirability in other respects, there's
>considerable incentive to use Unix due to its portability.  When an O.S. is
>needed for a new system, Unix can be brought up quickly, since most of it is
>written in C.  What gets overlooked by the naive management which allows the
>thing into the company, of course, is that (1) they're going to be forever
>tweaking and grooming and hassling and hacking in an effort to get it to run
>efficiently - which is hopeless, since it will never be as efficient as a
>completely native O.S.  no matter how long one fiddles with it - and (2) as
>long as they keep attempting to use it, they're going to have to put up with
>Unix-people...
>

Let me say first that I thought Dave's diatribe was well written and 
mostly accurate (if one gives allowance for hyperbole).  UNIX does have flaws;
many of us, in fact, delight in finding those flaws.

But he missed the point with portability.  UNIX will never be as efficient as
a completely native O.S., true, but with the speed of current hardware
this issue is largely moot.  With a good "user/machine power" ratio,
the OS stuff occurs so fast that the speed advantage of the native OS is 
imperceptible to users.  Most users care only that when they type "ls"
a bunch of filenames immediately appears on their terminal.  They don't care
if a native operation system could have done so 5 milliseconds faster.

What looms increasingly important in this modern era is portability,
standands, the human-software interface...  We are withdrawing from our 
machines.  We want to carry our interface with us, even if that
interface is as klutzy as UNIX.  Its hard enough getting people to
try out new word processors, much less entire operating systems.
The politics of marketing ("gimmee MS-DOS", gimmee UNIX") dictates
a limited number of operating systems rather than one for every machine.  
For various reasons UNIX has gained a large following.  We probably
could have made a better choice, but we didn't, so tough.  In fact,
we didn't really make a choice, it just happened.  We could have done worse.


-- 

					Don Davis
					JHU/APL
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