Comment by JdeBP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JdeBP | Hacker News Reader

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I've had the classic Unix experience. It's not something that a typical user of the 21st century would either want or enjoy. There was everything from modem line noise to whether it was BS or DEL this week that actually erased a character. And yes, things like what is pointed out in the article: output from other places randomly overwriting the UI of a full-screen (curses) program.

We who lived through the classic Unix experience also remember how at the time MS/PC/DR-DOS had things that we 300 BPS terminal users could but dream of, like an Alt key that just worked and highlighted menu option accelerators when one pressed it. And function keys that didn't just cause a mess, or beeps, or surprise commands to happen.

Typical users of the 21st century would be appalled when faced with it. And there's probably no retrocomputing enthusiast that is quite that masochistic. (-:

Much of what sysinst does is just farmed out to tar, pkg_add, ifconfig, and other programs. It even handily prints their command lines at the top of the screen when they are running. So someone who wants a CLI rather than a TUI, and not really the actual "classic Unix experience", could just run those programs. And there's probably room for an installer that does the same thing as sysinst but in the old text-adventure-game style of print-menu-prompt-for-line-with-selection for people with printer terminals. (-:

Like AIX 7's installer:

* https://ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.3.0?topic=system-using-bos-men...

But don't knock full screen TUI programs like sysinst. There's definitely a place for them, and on the commercial Unices, where the vendors had gone to some effort to make the installation and configuration programs user-friendly, they were the "classic Unix experience". SCO had one, for example. They even managed to have it recognize F1 for help.

* https://sco.com/products/openserver6/reviewers_guide2.html

Function keys. F1 for help. This stuff for contemporary Unix people was like the "Classic MS-DOS experience", but at the time when PC users were using GUI installation programs in DOS+Windows 3. (-:

I'm not sure anyone invoking "classic Unix" is pining for modem noise or line printers, though that seems to be how you're interpreting it. That’s more a caricature of early computing than what defines the Unix philosophy or what NetBSD preserves.

When I say classic Unix, I really mean "simple software":

- Text-first, scriptable interfaces where tools do one thing well and can be composed

- Human-readable configuration in plain files, no XML or opaque binary blobs

- Predictable, minimal system design where you can understand what’s happening under the hood without chasing abstraction layers

- Manual pages that matter, and a userspace that favors understanding over wizard-driven opacity

- A system that’s BSD-like in spirit: clean, coherent, documented, and built by people who care more about correctness and clarity than flash or trends

This is in contrast to modern Linux distributions where systems are often a tangled mess of systemd units, layers of more or less obscure daemons and processes, unpredictable behaviors, and YAML/JSON/XML-based abstractions that sit between you and the actual system.

So no, I'm not glorifying the past or pretending users in 2025 would enjoy a serial terminal setup from 1984. I’m saying that a clean, simple, consistent, modular Unix, in the traditional sense, is still valuable and NetBSD is one of the few OSes that still embodies that ethos.

That romanticizes a vision of Unix that hasn't existed for like four decades, aside from maybe Xenix bitty boxes from Radio Shack servicing two terminals in auto shops, video stores, and the like. People bought Unix workstation and server systems specifically to run large, complex applications. Applications that did many things and kept their configuration in binary blobs or XML files. Stability, security, comprehensiveness, and ease of administration are stronger selling points for these systems than simplicity.

As an example of how comprehensive beats simple in the real world, consider Microsoft Outlook. Not just email, but calendaring and contact management. Microsoft's engineers discovered that in the business world, these things go together and bundled them into one, well-integrated program. Outlook ate everybody's lunch, including Windows-based mail clients like Eudora. Integration with Exchange let these services be provided together on an organizational level, fully integrated with Active Directory, and Exchange came to dominate email server deployments over Unix-based solutions which were more piecemeal. Easier to administrate as well.

NetBSD is a fantastic tinkerer's operating system, one of the most hackable ones out there. But let's not kid ourselves here. The philosophy it supposedly embodies hasn't really served real needs in a long time, if ever. Customers want solutions, not hacks held together with shell and Perl scripts.

> As an example of how comprehensive beats simple in the real world, consider Microsoft Outlook.

Yes, do consider it: Outlook is great at ticking checkboxes, resulting in a product that is widely adopted and sucks to use.

This is hilarious because I am finishing up the installation of an extremely large complex and expensive project that is fully N+1 fault-tolerant and it uses Perl scripts for nearly everything; it’s a telecom grade SS7 phone switch with custom hardware and the supervisor part is Linux based.

All the customization and service startup is done in plain text and Perl, from what I’ve seen so far.

I agree with that. Modern Unix is a 6-of-one-half-dozen-of-another type situation. Yes, terminal emulators and the termcap database are improved. But now, the traditional Unix user might be surprised at how things are done. I have accepted that ... systemd ... manages my networking now (ok, it's networkd or something I guess?). But if you can't accept that, it's good to have some option that just uses ifconfig.

> a tangled mess of systemd units

Ironic you use that term when a number of systemd units is often the simplest way of cleanly, reliably orchestrating services and daemons, doubly so when theres any level of complexity or limitations you want to confine one too.

Its cute to romanticize a bunch of scripts to run and orchestrate things but its a nightmare I'd not wish upon my enemies. Less moving parts, yet conceptually more complex to properly manage beyond the basics with far more that can and likely will go wrong.

Systemd has its challenges in real world situations; it has given me enough downtime that I don’t run it on any servers that I am responsible for-I use Devuan which is a systemd-free Debian or preferably a BSD.

I will save you my further comments which descend into a rant :-)

> Text-first, scriptable interfaces where tools do one thing well and can be composed

emacs

> Human-readable configuration in plain files, no XML or opaque binary blobs

emacs

> Predictable, minimal system design where you can understand what’s happening under the hood without chasing abstraction layers

Maybe emacs

> Manual pages that matter, and a userspace that favors understanding over wizard-driven opacity

Probably emacs. Do I care about man when there is info?

A "typical user of the 21st century" does not want to install an OS, ever. They use what comes preinstalled on the device.

If an OS has to be installed by the end user, it is niche.

It's an impossible task to meet what typical 21st century users expect. For that, the OS would have to come pre-installed.

Furthermore, most typical users today are so entrenched in commercial software, and their walled gardens they wouldn't even attempt to use an OS without that software.

People don't own their devices anymore.

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