The Unix Haters Handbook

August 1995

Book Review: The Unix Haters Handbook, by Sinson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, and Steven Strassmann, IDG Books Worldwide, ISBN 1-56884-203-1 1994 $16.95

Elderly readers of this journal (those 18 and up) are of course familiar with PC-DOS, and its younger brother Windows 3.X. Younger readers probably think that Mac System 7 is all that exists. But, next to the number of people using PC-DOS, there are probably more users of Unix (and its variants) than any other Operating System (OS) out there today.

Unix was developed in the late 1960's by a couple of programmers at AT&T with too much time on their hands. Their stated purpose was to have something that would play the game "Space Travel" on a computer in their lab that had no native OS. So they wrote one, along with an assembler and file system. (One of these same guys later wrote the language named C).

Like a virus, Unix spread around the inside of Bell Labs, and then to surrounding universities, and then all over the US and the World. If the Internet ever reaches Mars, you will find Unix there too. "Unix became a commercial success Because it was a virus. Its sole evolutionary advantage was its small size, simple design, and resulting portability." " Like any good drug dealer, At&T gave away free samples of Unix to university types." The source code was initially available. So college kids started making changes to it, and the changes spread out like mutations of the virus. So, what we see today as a commercial OS that many companies (including my own) run some of their most mission critical business operations on, started out as a game playing piece of software, and was enhanced by college kids who couldn't find a date and spent their night hours hacking, drinking cola, and smoking who knows what. "Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that this is a coincidence."

This book is not a How-To book for Unix; it is not a "Unix for Dummies" book. It assumes that you do know a little about Unix, and that you have had some experience with Real OSes. It was never real clear just what they did think a Real OS was, but DEC's VMS seems close to the mark. And many favorable remarks were made about (yuck) the Mac. It is full of e-mail to an Internet news group known as Unix-Haters. Over the years, this news group collected hundreds of examples of why Unix is not really yet ready for prime time, even after 25 years of development.

This is a Fun book and a Funny book. It is sarcastic and critical, but always funny. Each chapter has a few computer cartoons. I rolled on the floor and howled when reading many of the comments. Unfortunately, my beloved wife owned only a Mac before we got married recently and did not understand a lot of the humor. People probably need to have at least some introduction to a command line (even DOS) before really getting into what this book is saying. "Anybody else ever intend to type: " rm *.o" and by accident type "rm*>o" ? Now you've got one new empty file called "o" , but plenty of room for it!" If that quote means anything at all to you, you will want to read this book.

Almost everything in Unix comes in for some flames. The Network File System of Unix is referred to as the Nightmare File System. The GUI on Unix (the Unix equivalent to DOS's Windows) is known as X. (Where did the name come from? The original MIT designer of X was familiar with a Window system written at Stanford, known as W, on a project known as V.) "X allows you to make a 50-MIPS Workstation run like a 4.77 MHZ IBM PC." "Where did the names "C" and "C++" come from? They were grades." Even the thing that Unix is probably most famous for, the way it blends all of its basic tools together with pipes to form bigger tools, comes in for some criticism. "I have a natural revulsion to any operating system that shows so little planning as to have named all of its commands after digestive noises (awk, grep, fsck, nroff)."

I have been using Unix professionally for six years now. I have been programming for about 30 years, have worked intensively with perhaps a dozen OSes over that time, and even so, I still feel very uncomfortable with Unix. For some years I rather jokingly called myself the President of the Unix Haters Club, never realizing till just recently that there really was one. Most of the things that I found weird or silly in Unix are described very well here. We selected Unix originally because of its small size, portability, and yes, low cost. This book points out that these are all the features of a first class computer virus. I feel very justified by this book; I feel that I am no longer alone. Reading this book was a very good use of my time.