Unix was a program gone bad.
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<title>Unix was a Program Gone Bad</title>
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<center><h2>Unix was a Program Gone Bad</h2></center>
Unix was a program gone bad. Born into poverty, its parents, the phone com-
pany, 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.
<p>
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 name-
less, faceless undergraduates, both men and women, often by more than one at
the same time, Unix fell into a hell-hole of depravity.
<p>
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 in-
creasingly 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:
<p>
<pre>
$sed <$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 instead."
$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
</pre>
<p>
Eventually, Unix began walking down Telegraph Avenue talking to itself,
saying "Panic: freeing free inode," over and over again. Sometimes it would
accost 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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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 cau-
tiously 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 to-
morrow." 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
to remain compatible with its parent personalities.
<p>
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.
<p>
- Ian Horswill
<p>
<b>
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