[TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

[ron minnich]

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 at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> Just a bunch of Unix-smoking dope gurus.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces at 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."
>
>
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