The UNIX-HATERS History xxvii mouse-sensitive Lisp forms). Or safe tagged architecture that rigidly distinguishes between pointers and integers. Or the Control-Meta- Suspend key. Or manuals. Time to boot! John Rose sent his email message to an internal company mailing list. Somehow it was forwarded to Michael Travers at the Media Lab. John didn’t know that Michael was going to create a mailing list for himself and his fellow Unix-hating friends and e-mail it out. But Michael did and, seven years later, John is still on UNIX-HATERS, along with hundreds of other people. At the end of flame, John Rose included this disclaimer: [Seriously folks: I’m doing my best to get our money’s worth out of this box, and there are solutions to some of the above problems. In particular, thanks to Bill for increasing my swap space. In terms of raw CPU power, a Sun can really get jobs done fast. But I needed to let off some steam, because this disappearing editor act is really get- ting my dander up.] Some disclaimer. The company in question had bought its Unix worksta- tions to save money. But what they saved in hardware costs they soon spent (and continue to spend) many times over in terms of higher costs for sup- port and lost programmer productivity. Unfortunately, now that we know better, it is too late. Lisp Machines are a fading memory at the company: everybody uses Unix. Most think of Unix as a pretty good operating sys- tem. After all, it’s better than DOS. Or is it? You are not alone If you have ever used a Unix system, you have probably had the same nightmarish experiences that we have had and heard. You may have deleted important files and gone for help, only to be told that it was your own fault, or, worse, a “rite of passage.” You may have spent hours writing a heart-wrenching letter to a friend, only to have it lost in a mailer burp, or, worse, have it sent to somebody else. We aim to show that you are not alone and that your problems with Unix are not your fault. Our grievance is not just against Unix itself, but against the cult of Unix zealots who defend and nurture it. They take the heat, disease, and pesti-

xxviii Preface lence as givens, and, as ancient shamans did, display their wounds, some self-inflicted, as proof of their power and wizardry. We aim, through blunt- ness and humor, to show them that they pray to a tin god, and that science, not religion, is the path to useful and friendly technology. Computer science would have progressed much further and faster if all of the time and effort that has been spent maintaining and nurturing Unix had been spent on a sounder operating system. We hope that one day Unix will be relinquished to the history books and museums of computer science as an interesting, albeit costly, footnote. Contributors and Acknowledgments To write this book, the editors culled through six years’ archives of the UNIX-HATERS mailing list. These contributors are referenced in each included message and are indexed in the rear of the volume. Around these messages are chapters written by UNIX-HATERS experts who felt com- pelled to contribute to this exposé. We are: Simson Garfinkel, a journalist and computer science researcher. Simson received three undergraduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master’s degree in journalism from Columbia Univer- sity. He would be in graduate school working on his Ph.D. now, but this book came up and it seemed like more fun. Simson is also the co-author of Practical Unix Security (O’Reilly and Associates, 1991) and NeXTSTEP Programming (Springer-Verlag, 1993). In addition to his duties as editor, Simson wrote the chapters on Documentation, the Unix File System, Net- working, and Security. Daniel Weise, a researcher at Microsoft’s research laboratory. Daniel received his Ph.D. and Master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and was an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering until deciding to enter the real world of DOS and Windows. While at his cushy academic job, Daniel had time to work on this project. Since leaving Stanford for the rainy shores of Lake Washington, a challenging new job and a bouncing, crawling, active baby boy have become his priorities. In addition to initial editing, Daniel wrote large portions of Welcome, New User Mail and Terminal Insanity. Steven Strassmann, a senior scientist at Apple Computer. Steven received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Labora-