Jerry Peek wrote:
I'm writing a series of columns on
"What's GNU in Old Utilities".
It describes new features of GNU utilities like cat(1) and
contrasts them to "how we used to do it."
The most famous rant on this topic (actually BSD, not
GNU) was by Rob Pike, "UNIX Style: cat -v considered harmful"
I couldn't find the thing itself (it's from a Usenix conference
in 1983) but there's a .ps version of a contemporary paper
with most of the content under
http://gaul.org/files/cat_-v_considered_harmful.html
Dennis