Preface Things Are Going to Get a Lot Worse Before Things Get Worse “I liken starting one’s computing career with Unix, say as an under- graduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act.” — Ken Pier, Xerox PARC Modern Unix1 is a catastrophe. It’s the “Un-Operating System”: unreliable, unintuitive, unforgiving, unhelpful, and underpowered. Little is more frus- trating than trying to force Unix to do something useful and nontrivial. Modern Unix impedes progress in computer science, wastes billions of dol- lars, and destroys the common sense of many who seriously use it. An exaggeration? You won’t think so after reading this book. 1Once upon a time, Unix was a trademark of AT&T. Then it was a trademark of Unix Systems Laboratories. Then it was a trademark of Novell. Last we heard, Novell was thinking of giving the trademark to X/Open, but, with all the recent deal making and unmaking, it is hard to track the trademark owner du jour.

xx Preface Deficient by Design The original Unix solved a problem and solved it well, as did the Roman numeral system, the mercury treatment for syphilis, and carbon paper. And like those technologies, Unix, too, rightfully belongs to history. It was developed for a machine with little memory, tiny disks, no graphics, no networking, and no power. In those days it was mandatory to adopt an atti- tude that said: • “Being small and simple is more important than being complete and correct.” • “You only have to solve 90% of the problem.” • “Everything is a stream of bytes.” These attitudes are no longer appropriate for an operating system that hosts complex and important applications. They can even be deadly when Unix is used by untrained operators for safety-critical tasks. Ironically, the very attributes and design goals that made Unix a success when computers were much smaller, and were expected to do far less, now impede its utility and usability. Each graft of a new subsystem onto the underlying core has resulted in either rejection or graft vs. host disease with its concomitant proliferation of incapacitating scar tissue. The Unix net- working model is a cacophonous Babel of Unreliability that quadrupled the size of Unix’s famed compact kernel. Its window system inherited the cryptic unfriendliness of its character-based interface, while at the same time realized new ways to bring fast computers to a crawl. Its new system administration tools take more time to use than they save. Its mailer makes the U.S. Postal Service look positively stellar. The passing years only magnify the flaws. Using Unix remains an unpleas- ant experience for beginners and experts alike. Despite a plethora of fine books on the subject, Unix security remains an elusive goal at best. Despite increasingly fast, intelligent peripherals, high-performance asynchronous I/ O is a pipe dream. Even though manufacturers spend millions developing “easy-to-use” graphical user interfaces, few versions of Unix allow you to do anything but trivial system administration without having to resort to the 1970s-style teletype interface. Indeed, as Unix is pushed to be more and more, it instead becomes less and less. Unix cannot be fixed from the inside. It must be discarded.