From: peter@global.hacktic.nl (Peter Busser)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: IS UNIX DEAD?
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 14:48:57 GMT
Organization: Global Village 1

sfkaplan@unix.amherst.edu (Scott Kaplan) writes:

>Peter Busser seems insistant in his response that UNIX has the ability to be
>all things to all people, if only programmers would make it as such.  Then all
>the UNIX world has to do is make it commercially feasible.

No, not all things to all people. It's just a matter of interfacing. As long as
you hide the details, then it doesn't matter if these details change. That is
for instance why C is such a popular language. The library hides (most of) the
details of the underlying operating system. I.e. the fopen() are implemented
differently under MeSs-DOS and under UNIX, but they have the same result. We
can consider fopen() to be a black box. A good user interface can do that for a
system. If programmers want to change the details, FINE! As long as they don't
change the interface.

>does not need to be ease of use.  The crowd that uses UNIX now will continue
>to do so, because they will make it more powerful and push its flexibility.

Of course.

>So both types of OS's will continue to grow
>in different directions.  There's little wrong with that.

Read on.

>maliable (sp?) OS.  If you make UNIX something that programmers don't want to
>use, THEN it will die, because nobody else will want to push it forward.

But... the largest market is the user market. If some system can dominate that
market, then that means that programmers are forced to write programs for that
system (or they lose their jobs) instead of writing programs for UNIX. What I
want to say is that it might be better to provide the user with 'our' system
then wait until the users provide us with his system (which 'we' know 'we'
probably don't like).

>Oh, and as much fun as we all like to make of MS-DOS, Mac OS, Windows...I do
>some tasks, some of them very simple, some of them moderately demanding, on
>such machines.  They're capable of some tough tasks...So let's not make them
>sound like their for simpletons only.

I'm not saying that. It's just that I'm used to worst case design... ;-)

>I would just cringe to think, though,
>what kind of mess my Mac interface would be if it contained the power of UNIX.

That would be monstrous! It's not what I would consider to be 'user friendly'.
What I want is a powerful user interface a la Windows or OS/2, with applications
that use the same user interface, with many system defaults (e.g. startup with
X, UUCP disabled (not removed!), etc.), and everything else exactly as we have
now in UNIX. IMHO, only the way a system is setup and the user interface stink
(from a user's point of view).

>Pull down menus that go on forever both down and accross, and some terrible
>way of mixing mouse selections to simulate what the UNIX command line does with
>pipes and such.  Bleah.

YUCK!

>Both kinds of OS can be better, and maybe something better will be developed...
>but strictly speaking, UNIX as the EveryThingOS doesn't seem such a wonderful
>idea.

I don't see much difference with a normal UNIX system we now know and a
polished UNIX. It's just that the disadvantages should be removed, otherwise
UNIX is a nice system.