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From: mjr@osiris.UUCP (Marcus J. Ranum)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Request for human interface design anecdotes
Message-ID: <1463@osiris.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 23-Nov-87 11:37:57 EST
Article-I.D.: osiris.1463
Posted: Mon Nov 23 11:37:57 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Nov-87 20:03:02 EST
References: <1721@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM> <1621@megatest.UUCP> <101@ateng.UUCP> <407@minya.UUCP>
Organization: My Etch-A-Sketch runs X-Windows
Lines: 36
Summary: *sigh...*

In article <407@minya.UUCP>, jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
> > This  request  has  spawned  many  stories  involving  rm  *  (or
> > variants)  that were not intentional.  
> > 
> > Then there was the time we did rm -rf ../*
> > 
> > The moral of this is that the command  interpreters  need  to  be
> > modified 

	That's the thing I really like about UNIX. See, if you don't like your
command interepreter, you can always trot out and write your own. If you like
an interface like, say, MSDOS or JCL, you can (after the lobotomy) probably
write one to look enough like your beastie to make you happy.

	If you're like me, and you're getting increasingly frustrated with all
the expansion, macroizing, aliasing, noclobbering, etc, that is getting built
into shells, you can go back to the Bourne shell, or write an even simpler one
that does even less. Actually, I have a "minimal" shell I put together - does
nothing but support an environment, parse a PATH, and do execs. It's amazingly
small and fast when you leave all the crap out. That's what UNIX was all about.

	My only concern is that UNIX, in its rush (by some people) to become
a "mainstream business OS" doesn't get so pink cadillac'ed up that it is not
useful anymore. Of course, there are always going to be minimalist OS' out 
there, so I'm not worried.
	
	There are some great paragraphs at the beginning of the original
"UNIX Time-Sharing System" paper, about the "soapbox" UNIX stands (used to
stand) on. There are some nifty ideas there.

--mjr();
-- 
"We're fantastically incredibly sorry for all these extremely unreasonable
things we did. I can only plead that my simple, barely-sentient friend and
myself are underprivileged, deprived and also college students." 
					- Waldo "D.R." Dobbs.