From Dobrica Pavlinusic on Tue, 15 Oct 1996 18:39:33 +0200 (MET DST)
Path: CARNet.hr!student!hdogan
From: hdogan@student.math.hr (Hrvoje Dogan)
Newsgroups: hr.rec.humor,hr.comp.unix
Subject: The Life of Unix
Date: 14 Oct 1996 07:09:44 GMT
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[ Article crossposted from rec.humor,comp.unix.admin ]
[ Author was Ilya ]
[ Posted on 14 Oct 1996 06:32:33 GMT ]
The Life of Unix
Unix was a program gone bad. Born into poverty, its parents, the phone
company, 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.
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 nameless, faceless undergraduates,
both men and women, often by more than one at the same time, Unix fell
into a hell-hole of depravity.
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 increasingly 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:
$sed <$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
Eventually, Unix began walking down Telegraph Avenue talking to itself,
saying "Panic: freeing free inode," over and over again. Sometimes it
would accosting 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.
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.
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 cautiously 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 tomorrow." 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 remain compatible with its parent personalities.
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.
CHAOS is an order unto itself.
--
A rival to the way you see
The bible let him be
I'm a threat to your survival
And your control company
You'll never burn me You can't contain me
You'll never burn me I am the power free
I'll be your heretic Truth belongs to everybody
Dedicated to...
--
Dobrica Pavlinusic ...2 share ! 2 flame...
dpavlin@public.srce.hr, dpavlin@foi.hr, http://www.foi.hr/~dpavlin/
Watch out for more...