Comments by "GH1618" (@GH-oi2jf) on "The Rise of Unix. The Seeds of its Fall." video.

  1. Unix is well-hidden on a Mac. As long as I don’t have to interact directly with Unix, I can tolerate it. The user interface on a Mac is Apple software. I’ve heard that OS/X was built on a Mach kernel which came from NeXT. That’s ok. It’s like saying you’ve used OS/2 (an operating system I like) without knowing it, because early ATMs ran OS/2.
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  2. I spent my entire career in programming. I have used many editors. Vi is the worst, in my opinion. "Brief is best" as the ads used to claim. It was. Brief is literally the only programmer's editor I have ever liked, and Brief for OS/2 was the best implementation of it.
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  3. Computer Science grad here (B.S., M.S.). I've never liked Unix, but my reasons are too numerous to cite. I know its influence has been spread far and wide. For example, the Mach kernel was developed in a Unix culture, used as a foundation for Unix systems, and, through NeXT, became the foundation of Apple's OS/X. OS/X is not Unix, though. Unix concepts can be bearable if they are hidden under a user-friendly interface.
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  4. I had to use a Sun workstation at one time in my career. Their mantra was “the network is the computer.” What that meant was that persons on other workstations could do things to mess with your workstation as a practical joke, and that did happen. I did like two things about it. It used “Life” as a screen saver, which was a good choice. It had a chess program which I found possible to beat, occasionally, so just hard enough to be challenging, not too hard to be pointless playing it.
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  5. Vi is the worst text editor I've ever used, and I was programming for more than 40 years.
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  6. I spent a long career as a real programmer, and have used many editors, including emacs. I can honestly say that the only programmer’s editor I’ve ever liked was Brief. The best version of Brief was for OS/2, which I think was the original. When NT stopped running my OS/2 programs, I kept my OS/2 machine running mainly to run Brief and Word Perfect, sending files to the NT machine on the network. I’m happy to be retired now, after being jerked around by industry trends for decades.
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  7. I have two degrees in Computer Science. Your first sentence is absurd. It is so over-the-top it isn’t even worth refuting in detail. Any person properly trained in Computer Science can think of many great achievements. I wouldn’t argue which was first because ranking them is subjective.
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  8. Odd. My opinion is that the command line interface to Unix is very poorly designed from a human factors standpoint.
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