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From: doug@cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy)
Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2017 06:11:03 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <201709211011.v8LAB39V022229@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> (raw)

> When you say MIT you think about ITS and Lisp.  That is why emacs IMHO
> was against UNIX ideals.  RMS was thinking in different terms than Bell
> Labs hackers.

Very different. Once, when visiting the Lisp machine, I saw astonishingly
irrelevant things being done as first class emacs commands, and asked
how many commands there were. The instant answer was to have emacs 
print the list. Nice, but it scrolled way beyond one screenful. I
persisted: could the machine count them? It took several minutes of
head-scratching and false starts to do a task that was second nature
to Unix hands.

With hindsight, I realize that the thousand emacs commands were but a
foretaste of open-source exuberance--witness this snippet from Linux:
	!ls /usr/share/man/man2|wc
	    468     468    6766
Even a "kernel" is as efflorescent as a tropical rainforest.


             reply	other threads:[~2017-09-21 10:11 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 73+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2017-09-21 10:11 Doug McIlroy [this message]
2017-09-21 17:23 ` Mutiny 
2017-09-21 20:15   ` Nemo
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2017-09-17 18:31 Norman Wilson
2017-09-08 20:54 Dave Horsfall
2017-09-08 21:04 ` Noel Chiappa
2017-09-08 21:09   ` Michael Kjörling
2017-09-09  1:16     ` Wesley Parish
2017-09-09  4:34       ` Steve Johnson
2017-09-09 13:04         ` William Cheswick
2017-09-09 17:26           ` Steve Nickolas
2017-09-09 17:49           ` Arthur Krewat
2017-09-09 19:40             ` Steve Nickolas
2017-09-09 20:33           ` Lawrence Stewart
2017-09-09 21:56             ` Steve Johnson
2017-09-10  1:27               ` Dave Horsfall
2017-09-11 16:20             ` Paul Winalski
2017-09-09 15:55         ` Clem Cole
2017-09-08 22:28   ` Steve Nickolas
2017-09-09 11:04     ` Michael Kjörling
2017-09-09 11:19       ` Steve Nickolas
2017-09-08 21:05 ` Arthur Krewat
2017-09-08 21:14 ` William Pechter
2017-09-08 22:13   ` Angus Robinson
2017-09-08 23:11     ` William Pechter
2017-09-09  5:13       ` Dave Horsfall
2017-09-09 15:41         ` Larry McVoy
2017-09-09  4:20   ` Dave Horsfall
2017-09-11 16:30   ` Paul Winalski
2017-09-10  9:44 ` arnold
2017-09-13 23:22   ` Dave Horsfall
2017-09-14 16:11     ` Ian Zimmerman
2017-09-14 16:15       ` Steve Nickolas
2017-09-14 19:30         ` Theodore Ts'o
2017-09-14 19:52           ` Steve Nickolas
2017-09-14 22:03             ` Christian Groessler
2017-09-14 22:39               ` Erik Berls
2017-09-14 22:52                 ` ron minnich
2017-09-14 23:04                   ` Warner Losh
2017-09-14 23:14                     ` Bakul Shah
2017-09-15 19:01                     ` Chris Torek
2017-09-15 19:50                       ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2017-09-15 19:56                         ` ron minnich
2017-09-15 20:34                         ` Chris Torek
2017-09-14 23:06                   ` Bakul Shah
2017-09-15  0:47                     ` ron minnich
2017-09-14 19:39         ` Kurt H Maier
2017-09-14 21:35           ` Theodore Ts'o
2017-09-15  1:40             ` Ron Natalie
2017-09-15 14:04               ` Larry McVoy
2017-09-16  3:40             ` Larry McVoy
2017-09-16  7:45               ` Steve Nickolas
2017-09-16 12:59               ` Ron Natalie
2017-09-16 18:19                 ` Andy Kosela
2017-09-17 18:37                 ` Chet Ramey
2017-09-18 15:11                   ` Steve Johnson
2017-09-16 19:20               ` arnold
2017-09-17  1:43                 ` Larry McVoy
2017-09-17  1:55                   ` Jon Steinhart
2017-09-17  2:14                     ` Warner Losh
2017-09-17  2:18                       ` Larry McVoy
2017-09-17 14:27                         ` Warner Losh
2017-09-17  5:13                     ` Ian Zimmerman
2017-09-17  5:19                   ` arnold
2017-09-17 18:49                     ` Chet Ramey
2017-09-17 18:57                       ` Kurt H Maier
2017-09-17 19:08                         ` Warner Losh
2017-09-17 19:33                           ` Bakul Shah
2017-09-17 19:22                         ` Chet Ramey
2017-09-17 18:43                   ` Chet Ramey
2017-09-18  0:12                     ` Larry McVoy
2017-09-18  0:51                       ` Clem Cole
2017-09-17 18:25               ` Chet Ramey

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