Logs: Blast from the Past

At some point in this latest battle on loganalysis, Marcus Ranum thus spoke this about why syslog was invented and what happened next:

"Eric brought all the logs together in one place, and saw that
       it was good, because they could then be processed with a
       single invocation to the god 'rm'. And the system loggers
       came, and bewailed the complexity of log data - because
       it was all jumbled together. So the loggers girded up their
       loins and burned many regexps and awk scripts in
       sacrifice and were able to eventually separate the logs
       into separate application-specific data sets, thereby
       undoing the work of the Mighty Eric at great expense.
       And they thought that it was good."

Read the rest of the very fun thread here.