Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!tektronix!ogcvax!omsvax!hplabs!sri-unix!dm@bbn-unix From: dm%bbn-unix@sri-unix.UUCP Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Subject: Re: TOPS-20 --> UNIX Message-ID: <12119@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Wed, 28-Sep-83 17:23:43 EDT Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12119 Posted: Wed Sep 28 17:23:43 1983 Date-Received: Sun, 2-Oct-83 03:11:56 EDT Lines: 49 From: Dave Mankins I worked for a couple of years on TOPS-20 and its predecessor TENEX before moving to UNIX. I found UNIX to lead to a large increase in my productivity almost immediately. The big thing that TENEX lacked that UNIX has is pipes and all the programs on UNIX know how to use them--I spent a long time trying to teach a large application program I was using to take it's input from another process (since that time the application has been moved off of TENEX and onto UNIX), and never really succeeded. That comes for free on UNIX. Of course, we cheated at BBN and rewrote the terminal driver to allow wakeup-sets and stop-at-the-bottom-of-the-page mode, CRT-oriented erasing, etc. (this was back in the days of V6). (Pipe everything through MORE? gag. Build MORE into readnews and news and the mail-reading program? double-gag.) When my TOPS-20/TENEX friends ask me why I prefer UNIX, I tell them about a 25-LINE LONG SHELL file I once wrote in about an hour (I made lots of refinements) which goes and gets the past few day's messages off of MIT-AI's bulletin board (running FTP from a pipe, using AWK to generate FTP's command-input) and puts them into uniquely-name files in a scratch directory, so I can look at them at my leisure. How long do you think it would take to write a similar program on TOPS-20? I'd guess probably two or three days of very heavy MACRO-10 hacking...Of course you'd probably never undertake the task in the first place since it would seem so daunting. But it's true that there are lots of lessons that UNIX could learn about paging, process-control, user-interface, documentations, etc., etc., from TENEX, and MULTICS. I was struck by the initial responses to Scott Cooper's (?) article ("How long are we going to put up with this crap?"). The responses I mean are the ones of the "Oh, yeah? Well name an operating system that's better!" About the ONLY operating system I've ever used with a worse user interface and which was more poorly-documented than UNIX was MIT's ITS system, which was abysmal in both those respects. Come on, folks, is UNIX the first "commercial-grade" operating system you've ever used? (ITS is by no means commercial-grade.) There are some really neat ideas out there in OS land. Don't think UNIX has it all. Look around a little.