Ah, the good old days, when Unix was Unix:

awk: record `<A href="http://842d...' has too many fields
 record number 20

In some quarters, it's popular to rag on the GNU tools and by extension on things that make heavy use of them (like, say, Linux distributions); they're bloated, have grown too many features and command line options, they use too much memory, the documentation is in inconvenient formats, and so on.

There's a certain amount of justice in those complaints. But one should not view the past through overly rose-coloured glasses; there are good reasons why people adopted the GNU tools, and in many cases it wasn't because they didn't have other options.