[TUHS] man-page style

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Clem Cole

    > Actually I blame the VAX and larger address spaces for much of that and
    > no enough real teaching of what I refer to as 'good taste.'  When you
    > had to think about keeping it small and decomposable, you did. ...
    > Truth is, it is a tough call, learning when 'good enough' is all you
    > need. ... The argument of course is - "well look how well it works and I
    > can do this X" -- sorry not good enough.

Exactly; the bloat in the later Unix versions killed what I feel was the
_single best thing_ about early Unix - which was its awesome, un-matched
bang/buck ratio.

_That_ is what made me such a huge fan of Unix, even though as an operating
system person, I was, and remain, a big fan of Multics (maybe the only person
in the world who really likes both :-), which I still think was a better
long-term path for OSes (long discussion of why elided to keep this short).

I mean, as an operating system, I don't find Unix that memorable; it's (until
recently) a monolithic kernel, with all that entails. Doing networking work on
it was a total PITA! When I looked across as what Dave Clark was able to do on
Multics, with its single-level memory, and layered OS, doing TCP/IP, I was
sky-blue pink with envy.

     Noel