Date: Thu, 03 Jun 1999 15:42:34 +1000 From: Greg Black <gjb-freebsd@gba.oz.au> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> Cc: David Scheidt <dscheidt@enteract.com>, Darryl Okahata <darrylo@sr.hp.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Kernel config script: Message-ID: <19990603054234.19335.qmail@alice.gba.oz.au> In-Reply-To: <3754898D.D2C7E08D@softweyr.com> of Tue, 01 Jun 1999 19:31:57 CST References: <Pine.NEB.3.96.990601170731.40428A-100000@shell-3.enteract.com> <3754898D.D2C7E08D@softweyr.com>
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Wes Peters writes:
> And, as far as *word processors* go, troff, nroff, and ed pretty
> much suck. Don't get me wrong, I completely agree they are useful
> tools, as borne out by the number of books that have been typeset
> over the years using troff. But a word processor they DO NOT make.
Clearly you have not read that remarkable book "Word Processing
on the UNIX System" by Morris Kreiger (McGraw-Hill, 1985), which
says in the introductory note to the reader: "This is a book for
beginners -- beginners to computers, to word processing, to
UNIX." Although the larger part of the book covers {n,t}roff
and friends, there is of course a significant section on text
editors, where Krieger explains why ed is a far better tool for
real writers than full screen editors such as vi -- and he only
covers ed in the book.
I first came across this wondrous work when consulting for a
client who had asked his previous consultant to "include word
processing" as part of a business system he was setting up.
That consultant felt he had done his job, as recently as 1986,
by providing a SysVr2 Unix box with {n,t}roff and ed, a
dot-matrix printer, and that book. For some reason, that
company was still using typewriters to do their "word
processing" when I came on the scene. I stole the book in case
anybody was tempted to go back to it for guidance, and have
provided them with a solution they find easy to use and which
allows them to be productive.
That's not to say that I think ed and troff are not useful. I
use ed every day, often for substantial documents. I use troff
less often, but certainly every week.
> > One of the machines I run -CURRENT on is a 4
> > year-old Pentium. Other than build times being longer than I would
> > like, I don't have noticable performance issues. The same machine
> > is essentially unable to run NT, and do work at the same time.
>
> But as a word processor, is it really any better than MacWrite on an
> original Mac 128K? Or, to stack the deck a little more, a Mac Plus?
> *I* don't think so. That was a system well suited to word processing,
> except the tiny screen. Nothing since then has advanced the state of
> the art in word processing, only in being able to do other things with
> your word processor.
All my Unix machines are excellent for my word processing
needs. For one thing, any document that I wrote 20 years ago on
a Unix box can be trivially printed today on any other Unix
box. This is not likely to change. And it is not likely to be
true of many other so-called word processing systems.
More importantly, they also serve quite nicely as development
machines for all the software that I write. It seems to me to
be eminently sensible to have computers that can do more than
one thing, and do those things well. Unix on the desktop serves
not only me and my clients but also my wife and my children for
all their needs. And it never crashes and nor do any of the
applications they use. This is a pretty good arrangement.
--
Greg Black -- <gjb@acm.org>
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