A Quarter Century of UNIX
UNIX is a software system that is simple, elegant, portable, and powerful. It grew in popularity without the benefit of a large marketing organization. Programmers kept using it; big companies kept fighting it. After a decade, it was clear that the users had won. A Quarter Century of UNIX is the first book to explain this incredible success, using the words of its creators, developers and users to illustrate how the sociology of a technical group can overwhelm the intent of multi-billion-dollar corporations. In preparing to write this book, Peter Salus interviewed over 100 of these key figures and gathered relevant information from Australia to Austria. This is the book that turns UNIX folklore into UNIX history.. Features: provides the first documented history of the development of the UNIX operating system, includes interviews with over 100 key figures in the UNIX community, contains classic photos and illustrations, and explains why UNIX succeeded.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
22mentions
18people
2009–2026years
45% recommend55% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- From the excellent "A Quarter Century of UNIX" (by the late Peter H. Salus):
Heidi would bring her dog with her to class and to her office. He was a very friendly dog, and a lot of the students enjoyed throwing a ball for him down the corridor to fetch. He even had his picture on the bulletin board with the graduate students: the legend read that he was working on his Ph.Dog. John decided to name the program after the dog: Biff. According to Heidi, John and Bill Joy then spent a lot of time trying to compose an explanation for biff - they came up with "Be notified if mail arrived." Biff, who died in August 1993, at 15, once got a B in a compiler class. According to Heidi, the story of Biff barking at the mailman is a scurrilous canard.
One of my favourite bits of trivia from that excellent book, but hardly anyone I bump into these days knows anything about that kind of multi-user Unix experience/environment these days. I barely caught any of it myself.
- A Quarter Century of UNIX, (Peter Salus, 1994)
- A Quarter Century of UNIX
Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier
- Peter Salus's "A quarter century of Unix" and "The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin"
Katie Hafner "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of The Internet"
- Also A Quarter Century of Unix by Peter Salus, https://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:q...
- For those interested in the subject I can recommend the very readable "A Quarter Century of Unix" by Peter Salus.
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