I Accuse Unix!

Subject: I Accuse Unix! (Was Re: Captain, take this OS outside and shoot it.)
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 1997 09:22:25 GMT

From: JB
Subject: I Accuse Unix! 
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 22:03:43 -0600

(LL: Usenet Repost 1997-08-25) wrote:
>"The user-friendliness & safety of Unix with the reliability &
>intelligent design of Windows"


This little 2-for-1 shot says it all.  You see, I don't hate just 
Unix, there's plenty of bile left over for M$ products.  (Since 
this isn't a M$-hating list, it doesn't show up here.)  But I 
blame M$'s success on unix.

If unix wasn't so incompatible with itself, so thoughtless, 
so full of silent errors, so randomly unreliable, and most 
of all, so user-vicious, M$ products wouldn't look so 
great by comparison.

I started out with punch-card FORTRAN on a mainframe, 
then  hardcopy terminal APL, followed by VAX/VMS 
FORTRAN.  After those experiences, MS-DOS was an 
interesting little toy, kind of like an Erector set: limited 
and not really strong enough for serious use.

Then the horrors of unix were encountered:  An old 
dry-hole mine with rotting shoring timbers, rounded-off 
odd-size nuts, half-finished tools manufactured from 
rare Taiwanese butter-metal, twisted I-beams that 
are a mass of cutting-torch scars & welds, dangerous 
abandoned galleries without warning signs that 
looked like every other part of the mine, and all of it 
black as pitch to boot.  

You could play in it some, but no matter how careful 
you were, at some point the roof would always fall
in, usually for no apparent reason. (Shades of 
nethack.)   It wasn't long before I reached the same 
conclusion everyone else had:  Nothing good 
could come from this.   

That M$ Erector Set looked a lot better after that.  
(Heck, Lincoln Logs looked a lot better after that.)

It's frustrating now to hear Weenix-Unies rail about 
the evils of Bill-ware when it was their incompetence 
that gave him the keys to the mint.  

None of them had the courage to point out that 
unix was not only buck-naked, it was butt-ugly to 
boot, and that it was time to start all over again, 
only this time with a decent programming language. 
(They still don't.  They'd rather argue with the facts
than face the reality that they can't give unix away.  
Anyone for a deep-sea mission to the Titanic to 
re-arrange the deck chairs?)

If one-tenth of 1% of the effort spent on kludging 
around unix bugs for the last ten years had been 
spent on *fixing* design & implementation errors 
instead of reveling in how "|<3WL" it was to be 
a unix-weenie, Bill Gates would not currently be 
a billionaire.

Instead, more incompatible hack-arounds were written,
and I'm running Windows 95 as the lesser of two evils.

No, Windows95 is not an operating system.  That doesn't
make it any better. it makes it worse.

Free versions of Unix have been stomped into the ground
by a Commercial Graphical User Interface



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