21 Mar
2017
21 Mar
'17
8:51 a.m.
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(a)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(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
Just a bunch of Unix-smoking dope gurus.
-----Original Message-----
From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@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."