In order to qualify for UNIX-HATERS, you had to send in a sufficiently vitriolic rant about Unix, or be recommended by a member notorious for their vitriolic rants about Unix:
From: cent@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: i help maintain unix-haters
Date: July 23, 1991 11:22:13 PM GMT+02:00
To: gumby@cygnus.com
Cc: unix-haters-request@mc.lcs.mit.edu, don.hopkins@Eng.Sun.COM
Date: Wed, 15 May 91 11:54:30 PDT
From: Gumby Vinayak Wallace <gumby@cygnus.com>
To: cent@ai.mit.edu
Subject: do you maintain unix-haters?
Don.Hopkins@Eng.Sun.COM should definately be on the list -- a much better
ranter than many who DO send to it.
done. i hope he enoys it.
DH>>>> Don Hopkins wrote:
DH>>>> I've collected some of my favorite Motif code and comments (from Netscape, courtesy of Jamie Zawinski), on my "Motif Angst Page": http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-windows...
DH>>>> Jamie put it this way: It's like trying to build a shelf of out mashed potatoes!
JG>>>> Jim Gettys wrote:
JG>>> Good analogy.... I didn't realize you were the author of the "The X-Windows Disaster".
DH>> I hope you founds it more entertaining than offensive!
JG> At the time, I remember it hurting; now I find it entertaining. Time cures such things. And Motif was definitely a vendor perpetrated unmitigated disaster: the worst of it was that it "succeeded" in unifying the UNIX gui, which means it succeeded at stopping all reasonable work on gui's on UNIX until the young Linux turks took over.
JG> And by '93 or so, the UNIX vendors actively wanted no change, as they had given up on the desktop and any innovation would cost them money.
DH>> The whole "Unix-Haters Handbook" thing was intended to shake up the status quo and inspire people to improve the situation instead of blindly accepting the received view. (And that's what's finally happened, although I can't take the credit, because it largely belongs to Linux -- and now that's the OLPC's mission!)
DH>> The unix-haters mailing list was a spin-off of its-lovers@mit-ai: in order to qualify for the mailing list you had to post a truly vitriolic no-holds-barred eyeball-popping flame.
DH>> I hope that helps to explain the tone of "The X-Windows Disaster", which I wrote to blow off steam while I was developing the X11 version of SimCity.
JG> Yup. I won't hold it against you ;-). Though any operating system with ddt as its shell is downright user hostile...
JG>>> The day I thought X was dead was the day I installed CDE on my Alpha.
DH>> And then Linux came along and changed all the rules and assumptions!
JG>>> It was years later I realized the young turks were ignoring the disaster perpetrated by the UNIX vendors in the name of "standardization"; since then, Keith Packard and I have tried to pay for our design mistakes in X by things like the new font model, X Render extension, Composite, and Cairo, while putting stakes in the heart of disasters like XIE, LBX, PEX, the old X core font model, and similar design by committee mistakes (though the broken core 2D graphics and font stuff must be considered "original sin" committed by people who didn't know any better at the time).
DH>> Cairo looks wonderful! I'm looking forward to using it from Python, which should be lots of fun.
JG> Yup. Cairo is really good stuff. This time we had the benefit of Lyle Ramshaw to get us unstuck. Would that I'd known Lyle in 1986; but it was too late 3 years later when I got to know him.
DH>> A lot of that old X11 stuff was thrown in by big companies to shill existing products (like using PEX to sell 3d graphics hardware, by drawing rotating 3-d cubes in an attempt to hypnotize people).
DH>> Remember UIL? I heard that was written by the VMS trolls at DEC, who naturally designed it with an 132 column line length limitation and no pre-processor of course. The word on the street was that DEC threw down the gauntlet and insisted on UIL being included in the standard, even though the rest of the committee hated it for sucking so bad. But DEC threatened to hold their breath until they got their way.
DH>> And there were a lot of weird dynamics around commercial extensions like Display PostScript, which (as I remember it) was used as an excuse for not fixing the font problems a lot earlier: "If you want to do readable text, then you should be using Display PostScript." The problem was that Linux doesn't have a vendor to pay the Display PostScript licensing fee to Adobe, so Linux drove a lot of "urban renewal" of problems that had been sidelined by the big blundering companies originally involved with X.
JG> Yup. Though I don't know the exact history there.
JG> I was really burned out after X11, and had an undiagnosed medical problem. So I wasn't in the fight for sanity when most of that junk happened; and Bob Scheifler's personality is such that he didn't either, and was at that point still very focused on the base system. And SGI saw OpenGL as a competitive advantage, so PEX took a slow death.
JG>>> So we've mostly succeeded at dragging the old whale off the beach and getting it to live again.
DH>> Hey, that's a lot better than dynamiting the whale, which seemed like a such good idea at the time! (Oh the humanity!)
DH>> <strikeout>http://www.perp.com/whale/</strikeout> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale
DH>> -Don
JG> Have you seen the whale video on the web? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSzU20ZGk
JG> One is amazed at how stupid some people can be.
JG> Jim Gettys, One Laptop Per Child
Here's some more modern footage of what it's like to work on X-Windows server internals:
I can't remember if I actually did get SimCity for News/HyperNeWS working...
I did spend a few years in the early 90s hacking around with PostScript in HyperNeWS and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Cool to see that you still have a page with some HyperNeWS related stuff!
http://www.art.net/studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html
I love discussion between knowledgable people that happens some time after the event.
A website or podcast that was a tech version of "The Reunion" would probably be popular.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc
Here's some of his sagely advice, which I'll quote from his wikipedia page: "He has pointed out a common fallacy among programmers today: that storing computed values in memory is preferable to recomputing those values later. This, he claims, is often false on current hardware, given fast CPUs and the long time it takes to recover from a potential cache miss."
But it's a totally different story about that flaming political loony who desecrated the Jargon file, misrepresented hacker culture (and himself as a hacker), flat out lied about not misrepresenting anyone, and always used to sign himself off as "the mad mastermind of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Netnews" but never delivered on any of the hype he promised. But at least he was honest about being "mad": he still says and stands by things like "In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population?"
I would love to see a retrospective discussion of the people who blew up that whale!
[1] Yes, I still call it X-Windows in the hopes of annoying X fanatics.