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.
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.
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:
$sed <$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
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.
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
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.
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.