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Unix - Life Story (fwd)
>Forwarded message:
>
> 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 a decent documentation and its source files had to go
> without 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 and 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 thta
> 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|\2.0: \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 high pitched squeal
> like a chihuahua 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 pancackes 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 system was requiring two megabytes of swap space for each
> open window. Unix began to bulge in strange, unflattering places. But Unix
> continued to take drugs and its internal organs continued to grow. They grew
> out its ears and nostrills. 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." Psychatrists labored for years to weld together the major poles of
> Unix's personality, "Beasty Boy", an inner-city youth from Berkeley, and
> "Belle", a southern transvestite whi wanted 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 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.
>
>--
************************* Azeem Iqbal Pirani *************************
*********************** Xibercom (Pvt.) Ltd. ************************
*********************** [email protected] ************************
************ http://www.egr.uh.edu/~ahs21457/venture.html ************
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