To all those people who looked at me weirdly, when I said UNIX is cool, here’s your chance to fight back :-) UNIX Hater’s Handbook Enjoy ! The book basically captures the eternal conflict between “Worse is Better” and “Do the Right Thing” also known as New Jersey vs MIT paradigms.

Btw, this is a pretty old handbook and most of the gripes are fixed long ago.

A few amusing tidbits below.

Mail version SMI 4.0 Sat Apr 9 01:54:23 PDT 1988 Type ? for help.
"/usr/spool/mail/chris": 3 messages 3 new
>N 1 chris Thu Dec 22 15:49 19/643 editor saved “trash1”
N 2 root Tue Jan 3 10:35 19/636 editor saved “trash1”
N 3 chris Tue Jan 3 14:40 19/656 editor saved “/tmp/ma8”
& ?
Unknown command: "?"
&

fs2# add_client
usage: add_client [options] clients
add_client -i|-p [options] [clients]
-i interactive mode - invoke full-screen mode
[other options deleted for clarity]
fs2# add_client -i
Interactive mode uses no command line arguments

About the source,

 /* You are not expected to understand this */

originally appeared in UNIX V6.

If a mail is deferred, the errorr is

Mail Queue (1 request)
--QID-- --Size-- -----Q-Time----- --------Sender/Recipient--------
AA12729 166 Thu Mar 26 15:43 borning
(Deferred: Not a typewriter)
bnfb@csr.uvic.ca

I can only imagine how the user must have felt.

About X,

If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer
than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed
the same principles—but you’d be able to shift gears with your
car stereo. Useful feature, that.
                                                    Marcus J. Ranum
                                                    Digital Equipment Corporation

I just couldn’t help laughing when I read this,

A shining example is Sun’s Open Windows File Manager, which goes out
of its way to display core dump files as cute little red bomb icons. When
you double-click on the bomb, it runs a text editor on the core dump.
Harmless, but not very useful. But if you intuitively drag and drop the
bomb on the DBX Debugger Tool, it does exactly what you’d expect if you
were a terrorist: it ties the entire system up, as the core dump (including a
huge unmapped gap of zeros) is pumped through the server and into the
debugger text window, which inflates to the maximum capacity of swap
space, then violently explodes, dumping an even bigger core file in place of
your original one, filling up the file system, overwhelming the file server,
and taking out the File Manager with shrapnel. (This bug has since been
fixed.) ....

About C and C++,

Q. Where did the names “C” and “C++” come from?
A. They were grades.
                                                    Jerry Leichter
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