Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2013 20:48:00 -0500
Subject: [WSFA] Charles Stross on operating systems as religions
From: Michael Walsh <walshmichaelj at gmail.com>
To: WSFA Official List <wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com>, WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

"Over the beer, the conversation turned=97for no sane reason=97to computer
operating systems. There being some non-technical folks at the table,
I then had to cough up a metaphor to contextualize the relationship
between Mac OS X and UNIX, thuswise:

There is one true religion in operating systems, and it is UNIX. Or
maybe it's not the one true faith: there's an earlier, older, more
arcane religion with far fewer followers, MULTICS, from which UNIX
sprang as a stripped-down rules-deficient heresy in the early days of
the epoch. Either way, if MULTICS is Judaism (and the metaphor is
questionable at this point, for unlike MULTICS, Judaism is still
alive), then UNIX is Christianity."

the rest:  http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/metaphor-for=
-the-day.html#more

mjw