Dynix, a retrospective view
Thu, 9 Dec 2004
Last night I dreamed that Dynix fell over, and it was my fault because I hadn't been paying enough attention to it.
I logged in to Dynix yesterday for the first time in a month, and it was strange. I had almost forgotten the keystrokes, even though they had been second nature after a year and a half of being a Dynix sysadmin.
The Millennium GUI is improving with practice, but I am still experiencing some nostalgia for clunky but deceptively powerful Dynix. The system was weird and counter-intuitive, but I could do cool and crazy stuff with it, kind of like an old 50's car with the hood up in your front driveway. Millennium is more like a hermetically sealed Mac—except the analogy falls through in several ways.
I'm probably not making sense. I'm not going to worry about that; it's too early in the morning for worrying.
Comments
Jeff says:
Dynix is a monster from the 80's, but they did something important to it—probably quite by accident. They made a system for a Real Database Administrator (analogous to Real Programmer).
You see, I've heard every one of your [Laura] stories about fighting with Dynix and winning to have a good perspective on this.
A system for a Real Programmer is not one that is clean, elegant and beautiful to program in. No, an environment for a Real Programmer is arcane, poorly documented and once mastered, disturbing feats of twisted logic can make it do anything faster than imagined. It takes a special sort of technomasochist to work with a system like that, but at the end of the day, one can hold nothing but awe for the speed at which a such a system will accomplish the impossible and the mind which powered these feats.
Dynix is a system analogous to this, except for the specialised world of the database. The database itself is not a standard relational database system, nope. That'd be too much in line with the rest of the world. It's a Pick database—one of those systems you never hear about, but whose adherents will tell you it makes far more sense than an RDBMS, and, of course, it works better. The RECALL query language is Dynix' and Dynix' alone. It is not SQL or anything even vaguely standard. It is arcane and very poorly documented. The system as a whole is a beast. I fondly remember the terminal interfaces at the Timberland Regional Library—I was brought up on MS-DOS, and when I found bash and Linux, I was never happier. Those terminals were all text, and no mouse, a perfect interface for doing actual work. The staff interface to Dynix is merely an extension to this splendid text interface. But most importantly, a person with a sharp wit and willing to get her hands dirty could make the system sing and dance. By using undocumented features and pushing RECALL beyond it's known limits, maybe even figuring out how to incorporate perl into it, the system would bow before her , the Real Admin.
This was Dynix. A temperamental 1980s era dinosaur, but a powerful one.
Jeff
- Posted 14:20 2004.12.13
- Permalink
Jeff says:
Dynix is a monster from the 80's, but they did something important to it—probably quite by accident. They made a system for a Real Database Administrator (analogous to Real Programmer).
You see, I've heard every one of your [Laura] stories about fighting with Dynix and winning to have a good perspective on this.
A system for a Real Programmer is not one that is clean, elegant and beautiful to program in. No, an environment for a Real Programmer is arcane, poorly documented and once mastered, disturbing feats of twisted logic can make it do anything faster than imagined. It takes a special sort of technomasochist to work with a system like that, but at the end of the day, one can hold nothing but awe for the speed at which a such a system will accomplish the impossible and the mind which powered these feats.
Dynix is a system analogous to this, except for the specialised world of the database. The database itself is not a standard relational database system, nope. That'd be too much in line with the rest of the world. It's a Pick database—one of those systems you never hear about, but whose adherents will tell you it makes far more sense than an RDBMS, and, of course, it works better. The RECALL query language is Dynix' and Dynix' alone. It is not SQL or anything even vaguely standard. It is arcane and very poorly documented. The system as a whole is a beast. I fondly remember the terminal interfaces at the Timberland Regional Library—I was brought up on MS-DOS, and when I found bash and Linux, I was never happier. Those terminals were all text, and no mouse, a perfect interface for doing actual work. The staff interface to Dynix is merely an extension to this splendid text interface. But most importantly, a person with a sharp wit and willing to get her hands dirty could make the system sing and dance. By using undocumented features and pushing RECALL beyond it's known limits, maybe even figuring out how to incorporate perl into it, the system would bow before her , the Real Admin.
This was Dynix. A temperamental 1980s era dinosaur, but a powerful one.
Jeff