This has always been my favorite part of the whole book:
"Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy."
It's quite a good book--the modern world of computing has been so strongly shaped by Unix that it's easy to forget that there are other ways. Of course, it makes me giggle when I read Lisp Machine programmers complaining about the size of Emacs (come on, guys, your machines took an hour to boot--I don't think your environments were especially small either), but it's nice to get some perspectives from outside the Gulag :) Reading the UHH led me to go poking around with old systems like ITS and TOPS-10 and VMS--mostly they just annoyed me, but I also learned some interesting things.
"Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy."
It's quite a good book--the modern world of computing has been so strongly shaped by Unix that it's easy to forget that there are other ways. Of course, it makes me giggle when I read Lisp Machine programmers complaining about the size of Emacs (come on, guys, your machines took an hour to boot--I don't think your environments were especially small either), but it's nice to get some perspectives from outside the Gulag :) Reading the UHH led me to go poking around with old systems like ITS and TOPS-10 and VMS--mostly they just annoyed me, but I also learned some interesting things.