The unity of Unix

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But does Unix have the right philosophy?

Before I start I want to make some disclaimers. Firstly, if someone criticises Unix it does not automatically mean they are pro-Microsoft. Most of what I have to say applies just as much to Windows as it does to Unix, in fact Windows and Unix seem to my mind remarkably similar in their approach.

Secondly I do not claim to be an operating system internals expert, only an applications programmer and user of systems software.

One central tenet of Unix is that every device is treated as a sequential stream of bytes. Every Unix utility uses this approach assuming that you will process whole files sequentially through pipes or redirection. However, in practice we often want to access devices randomly.

To take a case in point on the old minicomputer systems I used back in the eighties interaction with the terminal was a screen at a time. This meant there was no scrolling command line as in Unix or DOS. It was possible to map exactly where a character would appear on the screen. I think we can agree that all end user programs require this kind of approach. Yet if you want to address the terminal randomly in this way in Unix there is no standard way of doing it. Every program has to do this itself (vi being a case in point).

With data the matter of random access becomes even more pressing and in particular random access that takes account of the logical rather than physical structure of the data. Again Unix offers no support in this area.

Regard system software like DBMSs I might make the comment that these run on a large variety of hardware and operating systems. With Oracle for example, it is easy to set up remote connections from one server to another even if one server is running VMS and the other is running a Unix or Windows. It thus seems to me that the systems software is actually more "open" than the operating systems it sits on top of.

Having used Unix for a number of years I still think that the main reasons for its success are its portability and its cheapness, rather than any inherent qualities of the operating system itself.

I therefore sincerely hope that Unix (in whatever form) will not be the be all and end all of operating system development - or Windows either for that matter!

Posted by: jorwell   Posted on: 07/27/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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