Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Rules for development on Unix

Two posts bashing Unix in a row - this is corny, I agree. But I ran into this quote and could not resist... It describes X perfectly.

Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 08:31:33 EDT
From: Olin Shivers
Subject: Unix evolution
I was giving some thought to the general evolution (I use the term
loosely, here) of Unix since its inception at Bell Labs, and I think it
could be described as follows.
In the early PDP-11 days, Unix programs had the following design
Rule 1. It didn’t have to be good, or even correct,
Rule 2. It had to be small.
Thus the toolkit approach, and so forth.
Of course, over time, computer hardware has become progressively
more powerful: processors speed up, address spaces move from 16 to
32 bits, memory gets cheaper, and so forth.
So Rule 2 has been relaxed.

1 comment:

Илья Казначеев said...

Oh, and if we'll examine windows evolution, it would be like "Rule one: It doesn't have to be anything, Rule two: unless it helps sales or locks in".

UNIX-HATERS was maillist by VMS, mainframe, lisp-machine and other elitist computing guys.

I assure you they wouldn't sit in one toilet with windows people. UNIX was crap for them and Windows would be nothing for them. Back then they would've not discuss such an empty place.

I say that because we have a similar newsgroup here, it's called