Re: [TUHS] Book Recommendation

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

HP was much better than AIX, you could ignore their admin crud and
just edit the /etc files and stuff worked.  With AIX, I never figured
out how to not use SMIT, it was pretty intertwined with everything.
It was super annoying, I'm not saying it didn't work, it did, but it was
very clunky and you couldn't just go edit /etc/fstab and make stuff work
(well, I couldn't, maybe there is someone who could).  I hated it.

On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 02:39:19PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 1:43 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > SMIT - just say no.
> 
> There were a number of things IBM did well with AIX so I'm not quite so
> glib knocking everything from them.
> 
> But I agree that SMIT was the not so well thought out piece and never fully
> understood why it ended up being such a bad example of systems SW. ... but
>  .... I always suspected that SMIT was an example of what IT managers
> running mainframe thought of UNIX.  The folks at IBM set out (and did) a
> thorough and well thought out requirements study IBM style ... and then ...
> they only talked to Mainframe IT folks, not people that actually had
> experience in running UNIX in a production setting from their (like on a
> BSD or Ultrix based Vax or SunOS - i.e. instead of talking to the folks
> that came to a USENIX LISA, they talked to customers that came to a SHARE
> meeting).  So they solved the wrong set of problems.  SMIT was a force fit
> of UNIX to mainframe shop and never was quite right for either group.  I'm
> not sure the IT folks really liked it much better than the UNIX folks, but
> at least for them it used their terminology and their concepts (*e.g.* DASD
> *vs.* DISK).
> 
> BTW:  HP, I thought had a similar issue and they did not really understand
> the UNIX user.   DEC parts of so got it/parts did not.  Many DECies wanted
> Ultrix == VMS (and really wanted Unix to go away since VMS and RXS were
> really better in their hearts), but at least there were a ton of folks
> inside of DEC doing the Unix work that 'got it.'
> 
> As I have said before, it was always interesting having all of them as
> customers at LCC.  You got to see the good and bad of all the systems
> vendors.

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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm