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From: aperez@cvbnet2.UUCP (Arturo Perez Ext.)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Unix bigotry
Message-ID: <692@cvbnet2.UUCP>
Date: 7 Feb 89 22:35:52 GMT
References: <117@spectra.COM>
Sender: postnews@cvbnet2.UUCP
Lines: 30

From article <117@spectra.COM>, by pace@spectra.COM (William B. Pace):
> Those who think that Unix is a 'clean' OS have never looked at AOS code.
> THAT's a clean system.  Unix, bless it's tin soul, is NOT a clean OS, despite
> what Unix boosters want to say.  Don't get me wrong, next to AOS, Unix is my
> favorite - but that doesn't blind me to it's faults.  (Flames by mail please).

My curiosity is peaked by this statement.  I'm willing to bow to your greater
expertise since I've only seen 4 or 5 OS's up close enough to tell whether
or not I liked them (as a metric of quality :-).  What I'm curious about is
what version of Unix you've been working with.  Not meaning to start any
Unix wars here but from what I've seen, the SysV version is very clean while 
BSD has too many inconsistencies to make me feel comfortable.  For example,
in System V to adjust the controlling terminal's behavior I use 1 structure
and one ioctl(), and it's even fairly easy to remember the sorts of operations
you can do.  With BSD you need 5-7 different structures with as many ioctl()s
and you can never keep straight what you can and cannot do.  

The upshot is: in SysV I can maintain a clear idea of what's going on, what
operations I can comfortably control and so forth, while BSD has so many
gotchas that you forget whether you're coming or going.

Another operating system that is also difficult to envision is VMS.
I don't know of anyone who can deal with that machine without at least
10 manuals while SysV you can get along with just one once you get the
hang of it.

So, with this idea of "clean" in mind, what makes AOS so much "cleaner"
than Unix?

Arturo Perez