From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com (A. P. Garcia) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 20:30:29 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Ideas for a Unix paper I'm writing Message-ID: > All, IEEE Spectrum have asked me to write a paper on Unix to celebrate the > 40th anniversary of the release of 1st Edition in November 1971. I'm after > ideas & suggestions! of course this quote is always good for a chuckle: Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e." [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kenneth_Thompson] and I always liked this quote from Linus Torvalds: On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Rik van Riel wrote: > The real issue here is paradigms. The classical "everything's > a file" broke down with the advent of networking, sockets and > non-blocking reads. At the moment the file paradigm is so much > out of touch with computational reality that web servers need > to fork for each client and people are crying out for asynchronous > sendfile and other weird interfaces. Sure. But I think it's still a valid paradigm to consider "everything is a stream of bytes". And that's _really_ what the UNIX paradigm has been from the first: the whole notion of pipes etc is not all that different from networking. [http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/msg/7bcbbfeaea2b93c9?hl=en&dmode=source] > I'm also trying to chase down some quotes; my memory seems to be failing me > but I'm sure I've seen these somewhere: ugh..my memory is failing too at the moment. I'm sure I once read a nice rant of sorts about how Unix has proven to be of sound design that has adapted well to changes in the computing landscape...