[geeks] Mac definitions

[Michael Parson]

On Sat, 9 Jul 2011, Dan Sikorski wrote:

> On 7/9/2011 11:47 AM, Andrew Jones wrote:
>
>> Some day, you may have to swallow that irritation. Linux,
>> particularly RHEL, is dominant. It is telling that we have spent days
>> discussing Linux here, on a sunhelp.org mailing list.  As time goes
>> on, you will find ever fewer people who have ever used anything but
>> Linux.
>>
>> Whether we like it or not -- and I don't -- RISC and legacy UNIX
>> are fading.  There is little motive for today's hobbyist to trouble
>> himself to learn Solaris at home.  Even if he wanted to, Sun hardware
>> has become rare, and Solaris security updates are not readily
>> available.
>
> I disagree.  Learning different systems gets you to think about things
> more abstractly than what you see in a single operating system.  This
> prepares you for learning new ones when they arrive.

But these days, there are fewer and fewer things out there.  When I got
started in this industry in the early 90s, there were lots of flavors
out there.  I, for one, started on VMS, but other offerings from DEC
included Ultrix and eventually OSF/1->Dec Unix.  There was SunOS, then
Solaris, HP/UX, DomainOS, AIX, A/UX, BSDI, Dell UNIX, IRIX, the various
offerings from SCO, plus I'm sure a dozen others that were in active
service during that time frame.

Linux was a toy that some college student released in there somewhere,
that no-one ever expected to be anything more than a proof-of-concept
of a unix-from-scratch, something that may someday be able to 'compete'
with Minix.

These days realistically, what's left?  Sure, VMS has held out, beyond
all expectations, and attempts to kill it off, but on the Unix side of
the house, we have Solaris, which Oracle seems to be doing its damnedest
to kill, AIX, HP/UX, and Mac OS X.  Oh, and Linux.  And the Linux field
looks like the general Unix field did back then.

Take your average AIX, Solaris, or AIX admin and drop them in any of
the others out there, and they will stumble a bit at first, but will
probably eventally figure out how to re-ip the box and give it a new
default gateway, probably while logged into it over a serial line or
ssh.

Too many that have only used Linux won't understand why 'ls' doesn't
color code their files for them, if they've even seen a terminal prompt.

Yes, I've met people like this.  Their first Linux use was with Ubuntu,
and they love it soo much because it's not Windows, and they don't have
to do any magic to get anything working, all the zero-conf stuff just
works, and the little graphical package manager installs all their
software for them, and they never have to see a shell prompt.  They
sound like Mac users did 15 years ago.  Well, 15 years ago, Mac users
had an excuse, there was no command-line, even if you wanted one.

Today, most of the Mac users I know are Unix guys that wanted a
non-Windows laptop, but didn't want to fight with one of the Linux
distros and deal with random hardware compatability issues.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org
Austin, TX
KF5LGQ