The advent of non-typewriter input put a damper on Universal Unix. One has
to learn something to get started with a novel device. I am impressed,
though, by the breadth of Universal Unix that survives behind those
disparate facades.

Doug,

I totally agree. In 2005, I bought a Powerbook because I liked the aesthetics of it over Windows laptops of that era. I had been using Linux for fun but not without a significant bit of pain since the early 1990's (0.9 kernel), but never seriously. When I opened up my first terminal on the Powerbook, I began to love my Powerbook and Unix - beauty AND power! As a result of that exposure, I'm comfortable with pretty much any *nix and am only frustrated when distributions mess with the core tools or leave out system documentation.

To digress a little, my recent exposure to V6 an V7 have only served to reinforce my appreciation for the universal aspects of Unix. How is it remotely possible that OS's that are approaching 40 years old have so much in common with their modern ancestors? The thing that most impresses me though, is the durability of the documentation. I was reading K&R's "Programming Unix" in volume 2 of the V7 programmer's guide. When I came across a concise and informative description of fork:

Now  we  will  show  how  to regain  control  after  running  a  program  with execl or execv.   Since  these  routines  simply  overlay  the new  program  on  the  old  one,  to  save  the  old  one  requires  that  it  first  be  split  into  two  copies;  one  of
these  can  be  overlaid,  while  the  other  waits  for  the  new,  overlaying  program  to  finish.   The  splitting  is
done  by  a  routine  called fork.

Nowadays, fork is usually discussed first, with exec seeming to be included as a second class citizen (see Rago & Stevens APUE), which to me always seemed a little inverted. The K&R note shows exec first and then fork - seems logical - which is how most of K&R and most of the V6 & V7 documentation is - too bad most of today's documentation is either deemed unnecessary (vis a vis the intuitiveness of the Mac/iPhone or is of poor quality.

Your note makes me wonder what you thought of Plan 9's mouse input, or what K&R thought of it, about "having" to use a mouse for input. I'm playing with Plan 9 on my raspberry pi 2 model b and while it seems to work, I find the interface constantly getting in the way of my mind and fingers :). You even have to use the mouse to wake the screen up! Don't get me wrong, I find Plan 9 to be quite interesting and parts of it  conceptually elegant, but not the interface!

Later,

Will

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