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Interest Haiku #12: Unix
Monday, January 5th, 2004 01:07 amUnix -
bash% vim *.txt
touch grep strip mount fsck gasp yes
cat smoke that | more
Note: Unix is a registered trademark of SCO, which is having fun suing open source. Therefore, pipe the rest of this article through sed -e 's/unix/unix-like/ig' Because I really don't want to type "Unix and GNU/Linux and BSD and SunOS" a bunch of times.
My first experience with unix came in 7th grade, nearly 11 years ago. So what did middle schoolers on bvsd.k12.co.us like to do in the dawn of public Internet use? After running elm or pine to discover they had no email, they would run finger, then ytalk. Before anyone knew how to make a web page, they'd put long rambling jokes in their .plan. Without a concept of DDoS, the fun way to annoy people was yes you ar a moron | write tstone -- the clever ones would include ^G escapes and run script first, which oddly manages to obscure the yes-bomber's identity. I was amazed to find 50,000 digits of e, The Adventures of Huck Finn, and an ASCII kanji-of-the-day site on gopher. I spent several hours wandering around the filesystem with the magical commands cd and ls. I occasionally ran vi by accident and had to find the lab assistant who knew only "escape colon double you queue." I was excited when I figured out how to change elm's editor from med to pico.
After a few short years I came to love the power of unix. During the summer after my freshman year of high school, I read through the entirety of section (1) of the man pages. I probably didn't understand what 25% of the programs did and I quickly forgot about another 25%, but I think it helped quite a bit. A few months later I started using MH as my mail system because I liked the unix-style interface. I still use MH, though I'm pondering developing something with a back end better suited to massive amounts of mail. A year or so later I became a BVSD Internet Guide; guide1 (taking over for Dean Brissinger, who wrote a whole bunch of tools for the job). I answered questions from "I don't understand how to read my mail" to "How do I make a web page" to an occasional unix cleverness. During my junior year I read a copy of Learning Perl (The Llama Book) over spring break and learned more programming than I had in the previous quarter of C++ with Alvaro. In a sense, perl was the most useful tool I learned, since it's allowed me to hack together just about anything I want (including my own mail-checking program). But with perl as a crutch, I've only recently encountered some things like unix text-processing tools that I would otherwise start coding on my own (and probably quite poorly). For some entertainment with unix text processing tools, you can build your own random sentence generator. Unix For Poets shows you how.
Through much of high school I helped run robin-nvh.bvsd.k12.co.us, our own Linux server. That was one of the best learning experiences at New Vista, and I'm sad that recent classes of computer geeks haven't had comparable opportunities. I learned how to do everything from set up an Apache web server to how to deal with students abusing their computer access privelages to how to compile a kernel and lose a finger (thanks to Ben Leibig). Some people's high school stories involve driving around suburbia or making out at parties. Most of my fond memories happened in an 8'x20' computer lab office dominated by a giant blue blowy thing and, for a while, a 1985 IBM mainframe named Roc. But I digress. If you want to hear more such stories, invite me and another minion to a party or something.
I was a big fan of unix entering college, so during my first semester I bought LinuxPPC for my new G3 Power Mac. I dual booted with MacOS, but eventually went to pure MacOS for a few reasons. The early years of Linux On The Mac were fairly slow running, rpm packages always managed to confound me, and I couldn't ever get to my printer. I even had Debian on there for a while, but kept migrating back to the non-multi tasking, non-command line, but designed-for-the-hardware MacOS 8. I did, however, jump into the unix-based MacOS X Public Beta and most of my boots into Classic since mid-2001 were to print via serial port. Picasso, my main computer, doesn't even have the Classic Environment any more. I \heart MacOS X, but that's a haiku for another day.
I should probably say a word or two about distributions. I've had experiences installing and using FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and MacOS X, almost all of which have been positive, so I think Berkeley Unix deserves some accolades. I respect the passion, ideas, and success of Linux and I'm usually satisfied as a Linux user, though I've been known to utter inappropriate terms while doing system administration. RedHat is (was?) the leader, but my success rate with RPMs is significantly less than 50%. I like Debian's package system a lot more and they seem to retain more Open Source Purity than RedHat. I haven't played with any other Linux distributions, so I'll refrain from comment. I hear Solaris has some neat technical innovations, but I never feel quite comfortable with the Solaris/SunOS arrangement of things, especially the command line options for ps. I much prefer the GNU options. I spent a few months working in an IRIX environment, and several of those hours I would quite like to have back. SGI hardware is pretty keen, but compiling on it is a major pain.
The first paper we read in my OS class last semester was Ritchie and Thompson's classic Unix paper. It's a pretty easy read and is kind of overwhelming because almost everything they introduced (which was pretty revolutionary in the paper) is elementary today. Perhaps the greatest innovation of Unix was the idea to provide the same interface to all files and devices. This allowed people to write code that worked independent of where the data came from or went to. The OS takes care of the details of taking input from the screen and sending things to the printer, or perhaps a file from each one.
bash% vim *.txt
touch grep strip mount fsck gasp yes
cat smoke that | more
Note: Unix is a registered trademark of SCO, which is having fun suing open source. Therefore, pipe the rest of this article through sed -e 's/unix/unix-like/ig' Because I really don't want to type "Unix and GNU/Linux and BSD and SunOS" a bunch of times.
My first experience with unix came in 7th grade, nearly 11 years ago. So what did middle schoolers on bvsd.k12.co.us like to do in the dawn of public Internet use? After running elm or pine to discover they had no email, they would run finger, then ytalk. Before anyone knew how to make a web page, they'd put long rambling jokes in their .plan. Without a concept of DDoS, the fun way to annoy people was yes you ar a moron | write tstone -- the clever ones would include ^G escapes and run script first, which oddly manages to obscure the yes-bomber's identity. I was amazed to find 50,000 digits of e, The Adventures of Huck Finn, and an ASCII kanji-of-the-day site on gopher. I spent several hours wandering around the filesystem with the magical commands cd and ls. I occasionally ran vi by accident and had to find the lab assistant who knew only "escape colon double you queue." I was excited when I figured out how to change elm's editor from med to pico.
After a few short years I came to love the power of unix. During the summer after my freshman year of high school, I read through the entirety of section (1) of the man pages. I probably didn't understand what 25% of the programs did and I quickly forgot about another 25%, but I think it helped quite a bit. A few months later I started using MH as my mail system because I liked the unix-style interface. I still use MH, though I'm pondering developing something with a back end better suited to massive amounts of mail. A year or so later I became a BVSD Internet Guide; guide1 (taking over for Dean Brissinger, who wrote a whole bunch of tools for the job). I answered questions from "I don't understand how to read my mail" to "How do I make a web page" to an occasional unix cleverness. During my junior year I read a copy of Learning Perl (The Llama Book) over spring break and learned more programming than I had in the previous quarter of C++ with Alvaro. In a sense, perl was the most useful tool I learned, since it's allowed me to hack together just about anything I want (including my own mail-checking program). But with perl as a crutch, I've only recently encountered some things like unix text-processing tools that I would otherwise start coding on my own (and probably quite poorly). For some entertainment with unix text processing tools, you can build your own random sentence generator. Unix For Poets shows you how.
Through much of high school I helped run robin-nvh.bvsd.k12.co.us, our own Linux server. That was one of the best learning experiences at New Vista, and I'm sad that recent classes of computer geeks haven't had comparable opportunities. I learned how to do everything from set up an Apache web server to how to deal with students abusing their computer access privelages to how to compile a kernel and lose a finger (thanks to Ben Leibig). Some people's high school stories involve driving around suburbia or making out at parties. Most of my fond memories happened in an 8'x20' computer lab office dominated by a giant blue blowy thing and, for a while, a 1985 IBM mainframe named Roc. But I digress. If you want to hear more such stories, invite me and another minion to a party or something.
I was a big fan of unix entering college, so during my first semester I bought LinuxPPC for my new G3 Power Mac. I dual booted with MacOS, but eventually went to pure MacOS for a few reasons. The early years of Linux On The Mac were fairly slow running, rpm packages always managed to confound me, and I couldn't ever get to my printer. I even had Debian on there for a while, but kept migrating back to the non-multi tasking, non-command line, but designed-for-the-hardware MacOS 8. I did, however, jump into the unix-based MacOS X Public Beta and most of my boots into Classic since mid-2001 were to print via serial port. Picasso, my main computer, doesn't even have the Classic Environment any more. I \heart MacOS X, but that's a haiku for another day.
I should probably say a word or two about distributions. I've had experiences installing and using FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and MacOS X, almost all of which have been positive, so I think Berkeley Unix deserves some accolades. I respect the passion, ideas, and success of Linux and I'm usually satisfied as a Linux user, though I've been known to utter inappropriate terms while doing system administration. RedHat is (was?) the leader, but my success rate with RPMs is significantly less than 50%. I like Debian's package system a lot more and they seem to retain more Open Source Purity than RedHat. I haven't played with any other Linux distributions, so I'll refrain from comment. I hear Solaris has some neat technical innovations, but I never feel quite comfortable with the Solaris/SunOS arrangement of things, especially the command line options for ps. I much prefer the GNU options. I spent a few months working in an IRIX environment, and several of those hours I would quite like to have back. SGI hardware is pretty keen, but compiling on it is a major pain.
The first paper we read in my OS class last semester was Ritchie and Thompson's classic Unix paper. It's a pretty easy read and is kind of overwhelming because almost everything they introduced (which was pretty revolutionary in the paper) is elementary today. Perhaps the greatest innovation of Unix was the idea to provide the same interface to all files and devices. This allowed people to write code that worked independent of where the data came from or went to. The OS takes care of the details of taking input from the screen and sending things to the printer, or perhaps a file from each one.
