minow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow) (09/27/83)
This note summarizes an article in the current (Sept. 1983) issue of the highly-recommended magazine, The Dec Professional. In summarizing the article, I have omitted many of the author's supporting arguments and examples, but emphasize that they are relevant and reasonable. The author has over seven years systems programming experience and has worked exculsively on UNIX systems for a major industrial firm for three years. An Opinion: UNIX Realities by Henry Glover 1. UNIX is not a good base upon which to build an applications environment. UNIX is oriented towards text-processing. The file system has no record-access system, no keyed or indexed files. These are supplied only through add-on packages from second vendors. It is basically a one-language system, targeted for the support of development of C language programs. All other uses, like Fortran-77 programming, are supported grudgingly if at all. Layered products, such as forms management packages, or dbms must be acquired from outside vendors, forcing a problem in support. 2. With UNIX, you always get a UNIX person. In every UNIX installation there seems to be a resident person who knows all about UNIX. The UNIXperson usually arrives at the employer's door bearing software which has been acquired from other UNIXpeople, a favorite editor, shell, or backup utility. These then replace the system's own utilities. This leads to reality 3. 3. No two UNIX systems look alike. UNIX is supposed to be the standard operating systems for small computers. If no two systems look alike, what are we to use as the reference for standardization. 4. UNIX breaks. In order to optimize the performance of UNIX, its developers decided to cache disk blocks in memory, periodically writing them to the disk. This caching has the desired effect, with an attendant undesirable side-effect: when the system crashes (or power-fails), the file system gets corrupted. The UNIX utilities have tools for repairing such corruptions, and UNIXpeople are expert in using such tools. 5. UNIX is user-unfriendly UNIX was developed by programmers to be used by programmers for doing things that programmers do most often: write programs. This sort of user community does not need tutorial manuals, prompts, help facilities, explanatory error messages, and the like. They want succinct, quick communications. The UNIX manuals are terse to the extreme of being almost useless unless you've already read and internalized them -- and then why do you need a manual anyway? A certain consistency is always nice when using utility programs; some way to designate inputs, outputs, and options. Inputs and outputs are not usually a problem with UNIX unless there is more than one of either. When this happens, no two utilities have the same command line convention for designating these things. 6. UNIX look-alikes usually don't. When we discuss UNIX look-alikes, we first have to decide what it is that they're trying to mimic. Is it the shell, the utilities, and the commands. Is it the C language system calls? Or something more? Oh, by the way, which version of UNIX do they try to look like? If an operating system were truly UNIX compatible than utilities and second-sourced software should run on all such systems without translation. This is not the case. .... I am always suspicious of a system that is touted as the ultimate system, one you can do everything on, one which is 'powerful', 'flexible', and teh latest and greatest -- 'portable'. It seems to me that no system could do all these things well. But UNIX must be good for something -- but what? Transcribed and edited by Martin Minow decvax!minow
mel@houxm.UUCP (09/27/83)
I agree somewhat with what Martin Minow says, but please everybody - name and document your favorite system that is better in ALL these respects. Don't flame on about your goodie that beats UNIX in one or another, that's easy - tell us about a system that is really better than UNIX for doing those things people use computers to do. Is there a system out that has more, and more diverse user applications? Does any system out there not require a systems guru (IBM and DEC-10's seem to need whole groups of them - and who can get a DEC Rainbow to do ANYTHING useful without a guru around)? Is there any advantage to having the "mass produced" common system? We run a lot of UNIX systems that look similar, and true, no two are identical. But, mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with UNIX. UNIX allows them to look similar even though they run on dis-similar hardware and serve completely different user communities and purposes. Does UNIX break more frequently than other systems? Not that I have noticed. If so, shouldn't that be fixed? What other system has more novice users, and gets novice users doing useful work faster than UNIX? What system attracts and holds more users? Would you go back to TSO? CP/M? TOPS-20? CMS? VMS? what? why? Are any of the UNIX-alikes that aren't, better than the ones that are? Please answer all the questions, not just one or two. If UNIX is so awful, why is it so popular - and why do I like it so much? Mel Haas , houxm!mel
chris@umcp-cs.UUCP (09/27/83)
Obviously the guy hasn't worked with 4BSD. I find that file system
problems are very rare on the umcp-cs machine. It crashes a lot, sure,
but when it reboots, it usually cleans everything up. About once a
year something drastic happens -- usually due to hardware.
(eneevax is another matter; ever since we put up the RA81 fsck likes
to quit...something about the free list it doesn't like.)
--
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci
UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet: chris@umcp-cs ARPA: chris.umcp-cs@UDel-Relaygwyn%brl-vld@sri-unix.UUCP (09/28/83)
From: Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn@brl-vld> I suppose next you'll be telling us how great RSTS/E is.
chongo@nsc.uucp (Curt Noll) (10/04/83)
>I suppose next you'll be telling us how great RSTS/E is.
no, i think the DEC man was going to go on and glorify a RT/11 or
even, perhaps a RSX system? (no wonder dec employed the person!)
chongo /\../\