Worse-Is-Better

I got something from “Worse is Better” His example: two famous people, from MIT and Berkeley respectively, once met to discuss operating system issues. The “PC loser-ing” problem. The Berkeley (and Unix) guy , thought the right solution was “for the system routine to always finish, but sometimes an error code would be returned that signaled that the system routine had failed to complete its action.”, rather than “to back out and restore the user program PC to the instruction that invoked the system routine so that resumption of the user program after the interrupt, for example, re-enters the system routine.”. Because “the right thing was too complex.”. ...