Yes, the whole labor of hate argument was discussed in the foreword (written by Donald Norman):
“Sure, we love your foreword,” they told me, but “The only truly irksome part is the ‘c’mon, you really love it.’ No. Really. We really do hate it. And don’t give me that ‘you deny it—y’see, that proves it’ stuff.”
Norman remains suspicious, but the preface claims: "We have all experienced much more advanced, usable, and elegant systems than Unix ever was, or ever can be."
Personally, I imagine for many of the participants, it was a labor of hate, not of love. We could chalk up any ambiguous love to Stockholm Syndrome.
I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memories. The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below.
Your judgments are not keen, they are intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat, lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1 you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and addled by puffiness of the genome.
...
You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining.
Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.
“Sure, we love your foreword,” they told me, but “The only truly irksome part is the ‘c’mon, you really love it.’ No. Really. We really do hate it. And don’t give me that ‘you deny it—y’see, that proves it’ stuff.”
Norman remains suspicious, but the preface claims: "We have all experienced much more advanced, usable, and elegant systems than Unix ever was, or ever can be."
Personally, I imagine for many of the participants, it was a labor of hate, not of love. We could chalk up any ambiguous love to Stockholm Syndrome.