It even has an anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie which kinda reminds me of the Metropolitan Police spokesman's blurb on the back of Banksy's book.
BTW, it starts off with an anonymous quote that I've never heard, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. Unix is of course from Bell Labs. And anyone who knew anything would have said instead, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and BSD which at least would have been funny if still inaccurate. Anyways, it seems like a fun rant of a book which I'd never heard of.
The above point about not getting it can be applied to Linux as well. Lessons learned elsewhere are stupid until Linus finally understands them and then they're obvious.
The whole document is great but the anti-forward is so good I'm going to risk downvotes by reproducing it in its (short) entirety here, emphasis mine:
From: dmr@plan9.research.att.com
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 1994 00:38:07 EST
Subject: anti-foreword
To the contributers to this book:
I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memories. The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below.
Your judgments are not keen, they are intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat, lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1 you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and addled by puffiness of the genome.
Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost com- patible with the existing ones, albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the prisons to which they have been transferred.
Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining.
Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy. Bon appetit!
Thank you for posting this here; I absolutely love that anti-foreward, and it was life-changing for me in that it offered shelter to those of us who were defending Unix during a very, very dark time (namely, the mid-1990s). I have also (shamelessly) cribbed dmr's beautiful closing metaphor of a fecal pie and its "undigested nuggets of nutrition" -- it seems to just describe so much that is not entirely devoid of value, but it utterly foul nonetheless.
How were the mid-90s a dark time for Unix? Every engineers desk at every place I worked and every d/c I deployed to, it was the the only option (I avoided the AS-400, workhorse that it may well have been). Now, which Unix (HPUX, Solaris, AIX, IRIX) caused some angst, depending on the use-case...
IBM had developed OS/2, but was unable to effectively market it, in large part due to the intransigence of its development partner, Microsoft, who had other designs.
Microsoft was of course pushing Windows NT as the full and total replacement for Unix at the mid-server level. I'd actually bought that as my own first personal computer OS, and found it utterly and totally inadequate. Installing Redhat from a bookstore CD started me on my path (though I'd previously used Unix at uni and various jobs).
AT&T were busily suing the crap out of BSD over 1-800-ITS-UNIX, and losing, but setting back both commercial and BSD Unix by about 4-5 years.
Linux emerged during this period under constant FUD assaults by Microsoft, most of the mainstream Unix vendors, and pretty much everyone else.
And Apple was very much in its Dark Age, with OSX (Now MacOS) not due for release until 2002.
Unix was in use, especially in technical shops: scientific, software design, areospace, chips, etc. But it was deprecated in much of the corporate world over mainframes, minis (I cut my professional teeth on VMS), and early Microsoft variants. AS/400 was more an industrial and controls system.
And yes, proliferation of somewhat incompatible Unix variants (and how and/or where you installed the GNU toolchain on same) was another question.
That's not what I was trying to communicate. Rather that the options for online systems were generally: Mainframe, Mini (usually DEC), or Unix. Also, this was pre-Web "online", meaning for the most part in-house processing support.
I can attest to at least one case of VMS being retained in favour of Unix, which was retired. In the mid-1990s.
> Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.
Research Unix, yes. But the culture of unix is much bigger than some single copyright holder... this is why the entire thing is plain stupid. Study the levenez family tree. Read the archived Usenet posts and get a copy of the Cuckoos Egg.
http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
It even has an anti-foreword by Dennis Ritchie which kinda reminds me of the Metropolitan Police spokesman's blurb on the back of Banksy's book.
BTW, it starts off with an anonymous quote that I've never heard, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. Unix is of course from Bell Labs. And anyone who knew anything would have said instead, Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and BSD which at least would have been funny if still inaccurate. Anyways, it seems like a fun rant of a book which I'd never heard of.
The above point about not getting it can be applied to Linux as well. Lessons learned elsewhere are stupid until Linus finally understands them and then they're obvious.