The Unix-Haters Handbook

Modern Unix is a catastrophe. It’s the “Un-Operating System”: unreliable, unintuitive, unforgiving, unhelpful, and underpowered. Little is more frustrating than trying to force Unix to do something useful and nontrivial. Modern Unix impedes progress in computer science, wastes billions of dollars, and destroys the common sense of many who seriously use it. An exaggeration? You won’t think so after reading this book. pdf wikipedia

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1. “Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don’t think that this is a coincidence.”

2. Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the other numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes a mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the center of the dashboard. “The experienced driver,” says Thompson, “will usually know what’s wrong.”

3. “One of the advantages of using UNIX to teach an operating systems course is the sources and documentation will easily fit into a student’s briefcase.”

4. "Not having sendmail is like not having VD."

5. “Usenet is a cesspool, a dung heap.”

6. "Unix is touted as an interactive system, which means that programs interact with the user rather than solely with the file system. The quality of the interaction depends on, among other things, the capabilities of the display and input hardware that the user has, and the ability of a program to use this hardware."

7. "If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles—but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that."

8. "I have a natural revulsion to any operating system that shows so little planning as to have to named all of its commands after digestive noises (awk, grep, fsck, nroff)."

9. “Do not meddle in the affairs of Unix, for it is subtle and quick to core dump.”

10. Q. Where did the names “C” and “C++” come from? - A. They were grades.

11. "If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside"

12. "Unix is computer-scientology, not computer science."

13. "Pretty daring of you to be storing important files on a Unix system."

14. "The “N” in NFS stands for Not, or Need, or perhaps Nightmare."

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I [Ward] swore off Unix when I used Smalltalk at work and Macintosh at home. I was sick and tired of having my programs output scroll off the screen never to be seen again.

I returned to Unix when Randy Bush equipped me with an internet server/router wherein I discovered that one could now scroll a terminal window backwards. And neither Smalltalk or Macintosh did internet.