12 May
2013
12 May
'13
7:13 p.m.
You never forget your first UNIX.
2BSD (I think) on a PDP-11/70 (or so we were told -- I never saw the machine
room), taking a summer class at Harvard in 1983. Teleray 1061 terminals but
not enough TTY lines for them (so the TTY concentrator made you wait in
line). Awful, awful, terrible, bad system. It took several minutes to
assemble and link one screenful of MACRO code (a job a PDT-11/150 running
RT-11 from floppies could do in well under a minute). vi couldn't do line
insert/delete on T1061s so it didn't try (as you edited, your screen
gradually filled up with dead "@" lines until you refreshed). Every once in
a while, one of the operators/etc. would run into the terminal room and tell
us all to stop typing for a while, since the system would grind to a halt
when the TTY buffers filled up (or at least that's what they thought was
causing it).
So yeah it made quite an impression. I do use Linux when necessary (which
is quite a lot) but all the little annoyances still chafe.
Additional flamebait: I used to wonder what could be bad enough to make me
ever reconsider my dislike for Unix. So then Windows came along. Which got me
thinking, what could make *that* seem like a fun place to get real work done?
And then the smartphones and tablets arrived. So now I'm thinking -- ???
John (former UNIX-HATERS subscriber -- OK lemme have it!)