Maximum PC

Before anyone takes this title the wrong way... read some of it. It is funny, and sadly, mostly true. Of course, Unix has changed plenty since the time of this book (eg it doesn't crash daily anymore), but a lot of what they say here is still true (eg man pages).

Here are some gems...

In a previous job selling Lisp Machines, I was often asked about
Unix. If the audience was not mixed gender, I would sometimes
compare Unix to herpes—lots of people have it, nobody wants it,
they got screwed when they got it, and if they could, they would get
rid of it. There would be smiles, heads would nod, and that would
usually end the discussion about Unix.

[i]“I liken starting one’s computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate,
to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your
body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you
suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East
Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live
within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They
already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act.â€

I read that a few years ago. It is actually a really fun read. I will have to dig up my copy and post a few gems as well.

An absolute classic. Guess I'm going to have to dig it back up again too.

The book covers SOOO much ground that my quotes really only cover a fraction of the 360 (or so) pages. The whole section discussing the nightmare that is Sendmail is hilarious. It is amazing that it could survive this long. The idea that sysadmins really didn't exist until Unix came around is also very enlightening. There was no need... things just worked. Unfortunately, as with much of history, one of spoils of war is often being able to rewrite history in a favorable light. Thankfully, gems like the Unix-Haters Handbook exist to help us keep some perspective on things.

Appendix A contains an excellent account of how vastly inferior software, which Unix certainly was during the 80's and early 90's, was able to dethrone TOPS and LISPM systems. It should be required reading for every introduction to operating systems course.

I decided to re-read this one. Great read, free copy on scribd.com

"Unix is like herpes -- lots of people have it, nobody wants it. They got screwed when they got it, and if they could, they would get rid of it."

That was the first quote in my post!!! =P

Ha! I forgot you posted that.

I've read some of this book so far and tell that at least of it is still relevant, but how much of this book is still relevant.

Well, you still have disparity between flavors of Unix, sendmail (and others) still mangle message headers, cryptic commands with non-standard command switches, the hate for vi will never go away, and a host of others.

The big thing is that all of these issues are handled much better now. No one really cares about the differences between flavors anymore because building a program for your specific machine does not take days any more especially if there is a package manager, the MTA issues are handled much better by both the system and the clients, commands have evolved, and well, there will always be hate for vi.


Most of the complaints are reduced to mere annoyances now but in some cases that is not due to improvements in the system it is due to evolution of technology.

Before I forget, another one of the quotes that I really like is...
[i]We now return you to your regularly scheduled “I've been hacking so
long we had only zeros, not ones and zerosâ€

I don't know if it was exactly this, but something like this happened to me (fortunately I was working on the file at the time and the editor I was using allowed me to re-save it, so I didn't lose any work).

So that's why there are all those filename~ files being created in emacs! =)

I remember coming across one really onerous use of env vars in Unix one time.... IIRC, this guy had managed to concatenate the values in two different env vars somehow or had managed to use the value of one env var as a kind of pointer for the name of another... I forget now, but I wanted to KILL someone over that nonsense.