h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I mean what other operating systems has such gems like the yacc command (yet another compiler compiler)

awk|grep - lordy it takes me back to when men were men & computers were the size of a block of flats(apartments)

;^)#

Ah, yes! And floppy disks were 8 inches in diameter, and really were floppy. And code some tens of kilobytes in size took 9 hours to compile, and a single file of about a kilobyte took 40 minutes!

(Oops! I'm showing my age here! )

I last used Unix in anger about 9 years ago (plus a minor amount in the last 2 years or so), but I still include it on my CV. Agencies often ask 'How up-to-date is your Unix knowledge?' Do companies think that Unix has changed a lot recently? Do they think I'm likely to have forgotten those God-awful commands? Don't they know that the difference between an expert Unix user and a novice is that the expert knows where to go to look up what he needs? Lord! Give me patience (but I want it NOW!)!!

If you think 8" floppies are out-dated, I have some rather large 19" hard disks to show you...
Seriously, Unix has come a long way since then. Linux and SCO are the major players, with Solaris and other proprietary unixen behind them. If you can demonstrate a kernel-level unix skill, you may still get a job doing it now.

Personally, If you can't edit it with vi(2) then it can't be done. If you really need to use ed(2), then you are hopelessly out of date, but vi(2) is about the right level to get anything done around my place. There's nothing wrong with the unix standard commands, because 99% of real users probably don't get to see them at all. Only us unix hackers (who know what they all mean anyway) use them. What is the difference between horrible unix commands (du -s * | sort -nr | head -10) and it's DOS equivalent (oops, sorry, DOS doesn't have an equivalent command)

The bottom line is: Unix has been doing it that way for nearly 30 years, and it's still not out of date. Windows has been doing things it's way for 4 years and it's already out of date. Which system would you rather use?

Luxury.
When *I* were programmer, we had to get up at 3 o clock every morning and invent t'transistor.

Was that goin' down t'pit to program & livin' in a house made of t'punch cards style loooxury?


;^)#

Thank you caveman for your kind comments about Unix.I agree totally and I'm still running a system at present with a SCO unix platform.
Nought wrong with it I say.If you know the basic commands and a bit
of awk and sed it works well.

Just to say that at Bradford University the Computer Science department, still uses UNIX, and it crashes a lot less often than Windows...

Give me VMS or give me a lot of commands with silly names!
VMS - an OS for \real/ people!



H&K
Z

> an OS for \real/ people

Please take that backslash away and shoot it.

(unless of course you're the sort of person who likes unprintable characters in their file names... Causes me no end of grief that does sorting out these windows-damaged users who seem to think that directories called ELP and EWSTUFF are good names for directories.

Personally, I prefer the setuid copy of /bin/sh called ...

Did I really just say that.. \h doesn't mean backspace now does it...
Buggrit. Maybe it does, I can't be bothered to find out. I'm off down the pub. Eldon Arms, Portsmouth, Tonight (Mon 25 Nov) if anyone's interested.

Yoz's Original Collapsible Travelling Punctuation-In-Place-Alphabetiser (PIPA)

print grep(s/\w+([\.']\w+)*/shift(@w)/ge,
grep(s/\w+([\.']\w+)*/(push(@w,$&amp,$&amp[1]/ge,
<&gt,do {@w=sort {lc($a) cmp lc($b)} @w;''});

Discuss.

;^)#

Feel free to shoot my backslash, I only used it for *emphasis*, I don't need. That was part of the point, VMS doesn't need the whole keyboard just to make a command!

H&K
Z

Did you ever pick up a copy of VERB, a DCLTABLES decompiler?

All those interesting undocumented qualifiers and syntaxes for commands...

One day, I'll make a DCL/bash cross, but for now I'll stick with my trusty linux box (it's way faster than any of the MicroVAXen we have). Back at Portsmouth Polytechnic (many years ago) we wrote a whole multi-user, multi-room chat system in DCL, called 'nway' (an unlimited version of 2way, it's predecessor) which allowed unprivileged users to send $BRKTHRUW type messages to other users. After a while, it degenerated somewhat after we added various privilege levels, and allowed users to fight other users, with hit points etc. In the end, I outlawed all violence in rooms with a vowel in their names. The most popular room after that was the XYZ room.

No, we never got any of the fun toys, we only got official DEC stuff.

nway sounds like loads of fun. and all written in dcl? cool, theres a programming language you can do stuff with. I don't remember $BRKTHRUW, but then I'm not much of a pogrommer, I just did sysop & sysadmin tpye things.

H&K
Z

Actually, there were two tiny bits of pascal thrown in to do the nasty system service stuff like creating the world-writable temporary mailbox and waiting for messages to be dumped into it so that they could be $BRKTHRUW's to the terminal.

$BRKTHRU and $BRKTHRUW are the system services that send broadcast messages. They are basically what the REPLY command is a DCL interface for, although REPLY checks that you have OPER privilege before doing anything. You don't need any privileges at all to broadcast to terminals or users that share your UIC. We preferred broadcast messages because they can get through and not mess up the command line you are working on.

I wonder if any other NWAY (ab)users are out there from the Poly. Or the thing that supersceeded it, YAAG. I've probably still got your original source somewhere, even after all these years, that was some interesting DCL.

I particularly liked the way you could send escape sequences in the earlier versions to other peoples terminals. The best two were the pile of sequences that would redefine your character set to (for example) upside down characters, or sending (escape)[4;1y which logged them out by rebooting their VT320. Not very nice, but sometimes they deserved it.

Great fun. No wonder grades were down that year

Wow, sounds like loads of fun. Sadly very few places have VT's, from what I've seen anyway.

Last place I used VMS at, we put in a load of PCs and dec pathworks. that was a hoot, I can tell you!

H&K
Z

Right, so I, by trade, am a Unix Guru. However, I have not yet been able to grow a beard (which I am very happy about, seeing as how I am female). The definition of Unix Guru severely needs updating. I would attempt to come up with a new definition myself, but right now I'm rather busy trying to figure out how to mount the floppy drive of our Network Appliance to my workstation. I mean, it's 1.44 megs of wasted space! The 1 terabyte already there isn't enough. I shall probably have to send them a bug report. --WW

If you look at the conversation on 'Expert Users' (also related to the Unix article) you will find a definition of an 'expert' Unix user. I don't know if 'expert' is the same as 'Guru', but I intensely dislike the term 'Guru' anyway. It's meaningless as far as expertise goes, and a lot of job agencies use it without thinking. It would be much better if the agencies asked for a specific amount of experience, but that's just my opinion and probably a different conversation, too!

I agree it was a different thread! Last night it took 6 tries to even post something (h2g2's webserver kept giving me hex addresses instead of web pages) so hey, it's not my fault! Today I see the errors of my ways ...