Unix Quotes

Unix is back in vogue.

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX.

Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention.

Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad.

UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity.

Unix in particular is very poor at network printing.

Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX.

Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.

From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.

Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac and nobody cares about it.

C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new

Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.

The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.

This is the Unix philosophy. Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.

UNIX is a user-friendly operating system. It just picks its friends more carefully than others.

I do believe that in a race, it is naive to think Linux has a hope of making a dent against Microsoft starting from way behind with a fraction of the resources and amateur labor. (I feel the same about Unix.

Most hackers graduate from Unix and Linux platforms. They know them intimately. They don't try to exploit them

So I would not be surprised if the globbing libraries, for example, will do NFD-mangling in order to glob "correctly", so even programs ported from real Unix might end up getting pathnames subtly changed into NFD as part of some hot library-on-library action with UTF hackery inside.

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

How much does it cost to entice a dope-smoking UNIX system guru to Dayton?

UNIX does not allow path names to be prefixed by a drive name or number; that would be precisely the kind of device dependence that operating systems ought to eliminate.

I think Unix is a great system - especially for running data centers - because it is very mature, very reliable, very scalable. But when I want to go out and populate small devices, I think Java.

Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself - and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure.

I changed the Linux copyright license to be the GPL some time in the first half of 1992. Mostly because I had hated the lack of a cheaply and easily available UNIX when I had looked for one a year before.

Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

I am confident that we can do better than GUIs because the basic problem with them (and with the Linux and Unix interfaces) is that they ask a human being to do things that we know experimentally humans cannot do well. The question I asked myself is, given everything we know about how the human mind works, could we design a computer and computer software so that we can work with the least confusion and greatest efficiency?

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.

Unix is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs.

Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim.

I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out of Unix. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'"

Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

UNIX has a philosophy, it has 25 years of history behind it, and most importantly, it has a clean core. It strives for something - some kind of beauty. And that's really what struck me as a programmer. Operating systems that normal home users are used to, such as DOS and Windows, didn't have any way of life. Nobody tried to design Windows - it just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it. [...] I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think that they make really crappy operating systems.

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

Many say that DOS is the dark side [from Star Wars], but actually UNIX is more like the dark side: It's less likely to find the one way to destroy your incredibly powerful machine, and more likely to make upper management choke.

It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

I must say the Linux community is a lot nicer than the Unix community. A negative comment on Unix would warrent death threats. With Linux, it is like stirring up a nest of butterflies.

The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way... However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That's why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that's out there.

Huh? Windows was designed to keep the idiots away from Unix so we could hack in peace. Let's not break that.

In my experience, telling someone to switch Unix shells for ease of use is like telling him to switch cigarette brands for his health.

Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.

A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring.

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.

When we take a top-tier view of the amount of code showing up inside of Linux today that is either directly related to our Unix System 5 that we directly own or is related to one of our flavors of Unix that we have derivative works rights over--we don't necessarily own those flavors, but we have control rights over how that information gets disseminated--the amount is substantial. We're not talking about just lines of code; we're talking about entire programs. We're talking about hundred [sic] of thousands of lines of code.

I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot.

What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.