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Aucbvax.2660 fa.unix-wizards utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards Wed Aug 12 11:44:04 1981 Misunderstanding about Unix..... >From Nowicki@PARC-MAXC Wed Aug 12 11:35:03 1981 I would like to make a few comments on Donald Norman paper on "The Truth About Unix". The arguments for Consistency, Simple Models, and Mnemonic Aids should all be Motherhood, even though many system designers continue to ignore them. (If you want consistent abbreviations you can use RSX-11M for a while where all commands are three letters; then you'll appreciate Unix.)

The major mistake that is made, however, is failing to consider the possible multiple levels of abstraction. For example, the title says "The user interface is horrid", but in reality every level of abstraction has a "user interface," namely its interface to the next higher level. The motto of the Unix was not "let the user beware," but rather, "make the primitives simple but powerful, so as much as possible can be done at higher levels". With his arguments, you could say that all man-computer communication is doomed to failure because it uses only ones and zeros, which are not very mnemonic. The real problem is that an appropriate level for a systems programmer is not appropriate for casual end users. This conclusion is hinted at near the end of the paper, but it means that the paper should not be a criticism of Unix itself, but rather a criticism of how people use Unix.

The point that someone reading only the first few paragraphs of the paper can miss is that the primitives in Unix CAN be either easily replaced or encapsulated, while almost no other systems provide this capability. As an example, two Stanford students have implemented a TOPS-20 style command interpreter for Unix. It has arbitrary abbreviations, <ESCAPE> command completion, the question-mark help facility, and a delete-undelete-expunge facility. Version numbers for backup files are implemented with a simple suffix to the file name.

The real shame is that the Unix users themselves are forced to make the system as distributed from Western more humane, and thus every wheel gets reinvented many times. Luckily groups like Berkeley and Usenix are trying to help this situation, but as indicated progress is very slow.

-- Bill

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