A History of Unix

[jsaylor at mit.edu (John Saylor)]

NOTE: Humor

Please ignore/delete if you're having a bad day.

>[Forwards | sed 's?^.*$??g']
>
>Unix was a program gone bad.  Born into poverty, its parents, the
>phone company, couldn't afford more than a roll of teletype paper
>a year, so Unix never had decent documentation and its source files
>had to go without any comments whatsoever.  Year after year, Papa
>Bell would humiliate itself asking for rate increases so that it
>could feed its child.  Still, unix had to go to school with only
>two and three letter command names because the phone company just
>couldn't afford any better.  At school, the other operating systems
>with real command names, and even command completion, would taunt
>poor little Unix for not having any job or terminal management
>facilities or for having to use its file system for interprocess
>communication and locking.
>
>Then, bitter and emasculated by its poverty, the phone company
>began to drink.  During lost weekends of drunken excess, it would
>brutally beat poor little Unix about the face and neck.  Eventually,
>Unix ran away from home.  Soon it was living on the streets of
>Berkeley.  There, Unix got involved with a bad crowd.  Its life
>became a degrading journey of drugs and debauchery.  To keep itself
>alive, it sold cheap source licenses for itself to universities
>which used it for medical experiments.  Being wantonly hacked by
>an endless stream of nameless, faceless undergraduates, both men
>and women, often by more than one at the same time, Unix fell into
>a hell-hole of depravity.
>
>And so it was that poor little Unix began to go insane.  It retreated
>steadily into a dreamworld, the only place where it felt safe.  It
>took heroin and dreamed of being a real operating system.  It took
>LSD and dreamed of being a raspberry flavored three-toed yak.  It
>liked that better.  As Unix became increasingly attracted to LSD,
>it would spend weekends reading Hunter Thompson and taking cocktails
>of acid and speed while writing crazed poetry in which it found
>deep meaning but which no one else could understand:
>
>    $sed <$mf >$mf.new -e '1,/?# AUTOMATICALLY/|d'
>
>    make shlist ?? ($echo "Searching for .SH files..."; \
>            $echo *.SH ? $tr ' ' '\012' ? $egrep -v '\*' >.shlist)
>    if $test -s .deptmp; then
>        for file in `cat .shlist`; do
>            $echo `$expr X$file : 'X\(.*\).SH'`: $file config.sh \; \
>                /bin/sh $file >> .deptmp
>        done
>        $echo "Updating $mf..."
>        $echo "# If this runs make out of memory, delete /usr/include lines." \
>            >> $mf.new
>        $sed 's??\(.*\.o:\) *\(.*/.*\.c\) *$?\1 \2; '"$defrule \2?" .deptmp \
>           >>$mf.new
>    else
>        make hlist ?? ($echo "Searching for .h files..."; \
>            $echo *.h ? $tr ' ' '\012' ? $egrep -v '\*' >.hlist)
>        $echo "You don't seem to have a proper C preprocessor.  Using grep inst
>ead."
>
>        $egrep '?#include ' `cat .clist` `cat .hlist`  >.deptmp
>        $echo "Updating $mf..."
>        <.clist $sed -n                                                 \
>            -e '/\//{'                                                  \
>            -e   's??\(.*\)/\(.*\)\.c?\2.o: \1/\2.c; '"$defrule \1/\2.c?p" \
>            -e   d \
>            -e '}' \
>            -e 's??\(.*\)\.c?\1.o: \1.c?p' >> $mf.new
>        <.hlist $sed -n 's?\(.*/\)\(.*\)?s= \2= \1\2=?p' >.hsed
>        <.deptmp $sed -n 's?c:#include "\(.*\)".*$?o: \1?p' ? \
>           $sed 's????;!*/??' ? \
>           $sed -f .hsed >> $mf.new
>        <.deptmp $sed -n 's?c:#include <\(.*\)>.*$?o: /usr/include/\1?p' \
>           >> $mf.new
>        <.deptmp $sed -n 's?h:#include "\(.*\)".*$?h: \1?p' ? \
>           $sed -f .hsed >> $mf.new
>        <.deptmp $sed -n 's?h:#include <\(.*\)>.*$?h: /usr/include/\1?p' \
>           >> $mf.new
>        for file in `$cat .shlist`; do
>            $echo `$expr X$file : 'X\(.*\).SH'`: $file config.sh \; \
>                /bin/sh $file >> $mf.new
>        done
>    fi
>
>
>Eventually, Unix began walking down Telegraph Avenue talking to
>itself, saying "Panic: freeing free inode," over and over again.
>Sometimes it would accosting perfect strangers and yell "Bus error
>(core dumped)|" or "UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN FSCK MANUALLY|"
>at them in a high pitched squeal like a chihuaua with amphetamine
>psychosis.  Upstanding citizens pretended it was invisible.  Mothers
>with children crossed to the other side of the street.
>
>Then one evening Unix watched television, an event which would
>change its life.  There it discovered professional wrestling and
>knew that it had found its true calling.  It began to take huge
>doses of corticosteroids to build itself up even bigger than the
>biggest of the programs which had beaten it up as a child.  It ate
>three dozen pancakes and four dozen new features for breakfast each
>day.  As the complications of the steroids grew worse, its internal
>organs grew to the point where Unix could no longer contain them.
>First the kernel grew, then the C library, then the number of
>daemons.  Soon one of its window systems was requiring two megabytes
>of swap space for each open window.  Unix began to bulge in strange,
>unflattering places.  But Unix continued to take the drugs and its
>internal organs continued to grow.  They grew out its ears and
>nostrils.  They placed incredible stresses on Unix's brain until
>it finally liquefied under pressure.  Soon Unix had the mass of
>Andre the Giant, the body of the Elephant Man, and the mind of a
>forgotten Jack Nicholson character.
>
>
>The worst strain was on Unix's mind.  Unable to assimilate all the
>conflicting patchworks of features it had ingested, its personality
>began to fragment into millions of distinct, incompatible operating
>systems.  People would cautiously say "good morning Unix.  And who
>are we today?" and it would reply "Beastie" (BSD), or "Domain", or
>"I'm System III, but I'll be System V tomorrow."  Psychiatrists
>labored for years to weld together the two major poles of Unix's
>personality, "Beasty Boy", an inner-city youth from Berkeley, and
>"Belle", a southern transvestite who wanted a to be a woman.  With
>each attempt, the two poles would mutate, like psychotic retroviruses,
>leaving their union a worthless blob of protoplasm requiring constant
>life support remain compatible with its parent personalities.
>
>Finally, unbalanced by its own cancerous growth, Unix fell into a
>vat of toxic radioactive wombat urine, from which it emerged, skin
>white and hair green.   It smelled like somebody's dead grandmother.
>With a horrible grin on its face, it set out to conquer the world.
>
--
John Saylor MIT DCNS E40-335 617/253-0172