Quotes About Unix

There is a flip side to this. In the Unix world, libraries which are delivered as libraries should come with exerciser programs.

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done. Dilbert newsletter 3.0, 1994 —Scott Adams

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel - that pretty much the entire Internet runs on - is written in C.

But Unix had a serious shortcoming: No common version existed. Over the years different versions of Unix had proliferated like weeds, so that an application written for one would not run unmodified on another. While DOS presented a single target to consumers, applications writers and computer makers, Unix did not.

If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of different places, just write a Unix operating system.

UTSL, which Maxine at first takes for an anagram of LUST or possibly SLUT but later learns is Unix for "Use The Source, Luke.

That time in Seattle—during the lawsuit—was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX." "Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive.

with anything else under UNIX (of which Finux is a variant), there are a million options that only young, lonely, or obsessed people have the time and patience to explore.

Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it only by reputation, and its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems to agree that if it could only get its act together and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the onrushing invaders, it could stomp them (and all other opposition) flat.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

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.

I came of technical age with UNIX, where I learned with power-greedy pleasure that you could kill a system right out from under yourself with a single command.

When he finally settled down for the interview, he said that even the advent of the web would do little to stop Microsoft's domination. "Windows has won," he said. "It beat the Mac, unfortunately, it beat UNIX, it beat OS/2. An inferior product won.

NeXT and making Jobs its CEO. In the spoof Mike Markkula asked Jobs, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling UNIX with a sugarcoating, or change the world?" Jobs responded, "Because I'm now a father, I needed a steadier source of income." The release noted that "because of his experience at Next, he is expected to bring

Apple's chief technology officer, Ellen Hancock, argued for going with Sun's UNIX-based Solaris operating system, even though it did not yet have a friendly user interface. Amelio began to favor using, of all things, Microsoft's Windows NT, which he felt could be rejiggered on the surface to look and feel just like a Mac while being compatible

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.

Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it -- badly.

VI was predecessor to hundreds of word processing systems. By now, Unix folks see it as a bit stodgy—it hasn't the versatility of Gnu-Emacs, nor the friendliness of more modern editors. Despite that, VI shows up on every Unix system.

Technologist Kevin Kelly suggests, "If a thousand lines of letters in UNIX qualifies as a technology, . . . then a thousand lines of letters in English (Hamlet) must qualify as well. They both can change our behavior, alter the course of events, or enable future inventions. A Shakespeare sonnet and a Bach fugue, then, are in the same category as Google's search engine and the iPod. They are something useful produced by a mind.