"
Windows 95 is finally out, and I keep reading in all the
consultants' columns that
UNIX is
dead. I believe them, of course--they're
paid well to make such
pronouncements--but UNIX seems pretty lively for a corpse. Whenever a
hardware vendor brings out the latest
hot box, it seems to be
running UNIX; the
telecom industry still likes UNIX pretty much; and there sure seems to be a lot of UNIX
users out there on the
Internet. If UNIX is so
old, how can it be producing offspring like that little
scamp,
Linux?
"
Maybe these
consultants are
confusing dying with age. UNIX is
old, a lot older than the other
operating systems that have long since
passed on. In spite of its twenty-six years, however, UNIX
continues to
crunch numbers while
younger systems can only gum them till they're mushy. What
explains this
mysterious longevity?
"I have a theory. UNIX
survives because, unlike other
operating systems, it lacks
doubt and
guilt. UNIX does just what you tell it to, as quickly and
efficiently as it can, and then it waits for more work. It doesn't worry about whether what you asked it to do was
fair,
beneficial, or even
sensible. It just does it.
"By
contrast,
Windows frets about you. It offers you hints and choices and
dialog boxes.
Help is everywhere (for what it's worth). And if you ask Windows to do anything of
consequence, it asks you to
confirm your
request, and then it tells you what it did.
Delete a large number of
files, and Windows is exhausted. It's not the
work, it's the *
stress*. It's no wonder that Windows systems tend to
freeze up where a UNIX system would crash.
"UNIX snorts at Windows-style
solicitude. UNIX doesn't ask you to
confirm--if you didn't want it to do what you asked, why did you ask it? Similarly, it won't
annoy you by reporting the
consequences of what you did. Why would you enter a
command if you don't first know its
consequences?"
--source unknown.