Wandering Thoughts archives

The good old days of Unix

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

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 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.