Tom Pittman's WebLog

(or something like that)

2003 September 16 -- Unix

The current issue of InfoWorld has a column by their CTO Chad Dickerson, describing his conversion to Apple's OSX. As his experience is somewhat the opposite from my own, I was interested in his thinking. "It just works," he said. Well, that has been the hallmark of Apple system software, but not so much recently -- at least not for me. Last week I blew away more than 8 hours trying to burn a single backup DVD. Unlike the old MacOS software I know and love, it did not seem functional enough to tell me how many more bytes to trim from a 4.25G folder to get it to fit on a 4.7G DVD. The previous week I blew six hours learning that OSX 10.2 is not even powerful enough to burn a bootable CD (at least 10.1 could do that). Why does this take so long? Unix is a system designed BY geeks FOR geeks, and not for real people. Mr.Dickerson is a geek. He switched from a cluster of Linux and Windows boxes to OSX. If you must run unix, OSX is arguably the best available today (Apple's former unix system, AU/X was probably easier to use, but it's long gone).

This semester I'm teaching two unix-based courses; next semester it will be another two, one of them about how it works. It's a great system for geeks and gamers. If you're being attacked by orcs, you have to know which of the weapons in your arsenal to shoot at them. Most of us don't, so we try the flame-throwing crossbow -- nope; OK, try the laser defragger -- nope again; what about...? When nothing works, get on the internet and download the cheats. Aha, it was the magic potion I neglected to pick up on Level 3 that I need to use on these orcs. On Level 5 the orcs are different, and the defragger works. If you're a gamer, figuring out these puzzles is fun; if you have a job to do, it's a pain in the wrong place.

In 1984 the Macintosh was a compelling system choice for my personal requirements, for these reasons:

a. It was new, and I could get ahead of the pack as a supplier of software.
b. It was small and learnable.
c. It was a radical change in technology, the harbinger of things to come.
d. It was incredibly easy to use, no arcane command line to learn.
e. Everything I wanted the computer to do, it already did, and did well.
Last year Apple killed the "aging" 18-year-old MacOS and replaced it with a "modern" 35-year-old system. How well does this new system meet my requirements? Let's see:
a. Most of the unix programmers have a 10-year lead on learning it over me. I have a lot of catching up to do.
b. It's huge, too big for any one person to understand.
c. It's 30-year-old technology, not event-driven at all.
d. The command line is everything.
e. What it does it does poorly, and most of what I want it to do, it cannot.
I really wanted to make the switch. For ten years my primary system was MacOS/6.5, a speedy little system that made the Mac IIci run circles around later Apple systems. I had a G4 running MacOS/9.1 that was slower in every way -- except running long compute-bound jobs, which were about 3 orders of magnitude faster. I need to use the newer hardware, but I don't like fighting the system to do it. After spending 20 years avoiding unix (and failing often enough to remind me why it's a good thing to avoid), I either had to switch to it, or participate in enabling a convicted criminal corporation to profit from the fruits of their crime. For three years I diligently tried to get a unix -- any unix -- system to survive the first reboot. I succeeded only when I got here and had access to wizards who have been using the system far longer than I. The MacOS required about 1% of a guru's time to fix the occasional problems (I was that guru for most of the users I knew); the PC requires closer to 5% or 10% of a guru's time to keep it up and healthy, but unix -- ALL flavors of unix -- need something like 50% guru time. The CTO at a large technology company IS that guru; unix is a natural choice for him and his shop. The receptionist in his front office is not a guru, and she doesn't want to become one; neither does his mother. Most computer users just want to get their work done; they don't want to fiddle around trying to get the computer to behave predictably.

Personally, I hope Apple succeeds, but I'm afraid they are moving in the wrong direction. The 21st century is event-driven and graphical, not file-based with a clumsy GUI thrown on top as another "user". Fifteen years ago I used to say that Apple was like the USA government: way out ahead of whatever was in second place, but all parties were desperately trying to close the gap. Now, the federal government has changed direction, and is once again trying (feebly) to preserve the distinctives of what it means to be American, but Apple actually succeeded in passing up and trading places with the second-place runner. In terms of ease of use, WindowsXP, bad as it is, beats OSX. sigh