Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Quaint or antiquated?

It's the 21st century for Heaven's sake!

And yet some of our operating systems have some features that could be described as quaint.

For example, the regular mail client doesn't understand mime; we still have some shells that don't do command line editing; some operating systems think that compiling a kernel is a good thing; monstrosities such as rsh, rlogin, telnet, rexec still exist.

Another entertaining one is the fact that many operating systems still ship with uucp networking. Oh good grief! I've been using these things for almost 20 years and I've never come across one in all that time that's ever needed it. Are there any uucp capable systems still out there?

In fact, I think I was being too generous. This sort of thing isn't quaint. It's antiquated, and we need to move on and do better.

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