[TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

[downing.nick@gmail.com (Nick Downing)]

For me the nerd stage was a bit like the caterpillar whereas the hippy
stage was the butterfly. So you know, I'm a proud ex-nerd and a proud
ex-hippy, however I moved past both things a long time ago. If my kids
were to become nerds or hippies though, I would understand, since we
all need to make our own mistakes to move forward. As to the other
topic of Ron's post, well "small is beautiful" continues here, however
I find my ideas not gaining much currency on this forum. That could
be, because it's a historical forum rather than a "how to develop and
improve unix" forum. Or it could be, because people after using
something for a lifetime tend to take for granted a lot of the design
ideas in it.
cheers, Nick

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 10:05 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
> At the time I got into Unix in 1976, E. F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful"
> book was fairly popular, with IBM and the BUNCH as the bloated counterpoint
> (OS/MVS kernels were 256K!), and the idea of Unix as the small is beautiful
> operating system was a common theme.
>
> It wasn't really about small. Small was the happy result of a way of
> approaching problems. It was about putting in the time to think things
> through, rather than just emitting gobs of code. Hence a common theme was
> the idea you did your best to avoid writing code by spending time working
> things through. RK05s, 16 bit address space, and Decwriter II terminals
> tended to encourage that kind of economy. Those days are long gone of
> course; I noticed the other day that on Linux there are 16 commands that
> start with ls, that do roughly the same function, and nobody seems to think
> this is a bad thing. The only place the original 'small is beautiful' Unix
> ideas continue on that I know of is Plan 9.
>
> ron
>
> On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 3:32 PM Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>>
>> Just a bunch of Unix-smoking dope gurus.
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces at minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Dave
>> Horsfall
>> Sent: Monday, March 20, 2017 6:11 PM
>> To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
>> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?
>>
>> Well, I certainly had long hair and a beard (still do, at 64!), a Unix
>> user
>> since about 1976 (basically when it first arrived in Australia), and have
>> "liberal" views (as in: not conservative); does that count?
>>
>> --
>> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will
>> suffer."
>>
>