Top 68 Quotes About Unix
#1. This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
Douglas McIlroy
#2. Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement.
Hal Abelson
#3. 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.
Richard Stallman
#4. Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Henry Spencer
#5. there are some problems no Unix command can address.
Aeleen Frisch
#6. ASAP has helped IBM take more than $150 million worth of Unix business from Sun since its inception.
James Larkin
#7. Unix in particular is very poor at network printing.
Michael Sweet
#8. 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.
Linus Torvalds
#9. 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.
Kenneth P. Thompson
#10. 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.
Dennis Ritchie
#11. The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected ...
Dennis Ritchie
#12. 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.
Jamie Zawinski
#13. 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.
Rob Pike
#14. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.
Rob Pike
#15. Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.
Brian Kernighan
#16. Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac and nobody cares about it.
Bill Joy
#17. Unix is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs.
Dave Cutler
#19. In my experience, telling someone to switch Unix shells for ease of use is like telling him to switch cigarette brands for his health.
Chris Espinosa
#20. 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.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
#21. If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done.
Scott Adams
#22. Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, they can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't. PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't.
Philip Greenspun
#23. 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.
Dennis Ritchie
#25. Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention.
Larry Wall
#26. 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.
Clifford Stoll
#27. 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.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
#28. 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.
Linus Torvalds
#29. Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.
Dennis Ritchie
#30. 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.
Rob Pike
#31. How much does it cost to entice a dope-smoking UNIX system guru to Dayton?
Brian Boyle
#32. Unix, BSD, Linux, Mac OS, Windows are Monozukuri.
Mehmet Kececi
#33. Unix is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate the simplicity..
Dennis Ritchie
#34. CSV (fields separated by commas, double quotes used to escape commas, no continuation lines) is rarely found under Unix.
Eric S. Raymond
#35. found on other Unix-like systems. The design is actually specified in a published standard called the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.
William E. Shotts Jr.
#36. Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself - and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure.
Eric Allman
#37. Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
Douglas Gwyn
#38. Most hackers graduate from Unix and Linux platforms. They know them intimately. They don't try to exploit them
Dean Stockwell
#39. 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.
Linus Torvalds
#40. Huh? Windows was designed to keep the idiots away from Unix so we could hack in peace. Let's not break that.
Tom Christiansen
#42. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#43. Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim.
Darl McBride
#44. There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
Jeremy S. Anderson
#45. I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.
Bill Joy
#46. 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.'"
Tom Van Vleck
#47. 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.
Neal Stephenson
#48. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#49. Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.
Dennis Ritchie
#50. UNIX is a user-friendly operating system.
It just picks its friends more carefully than others.
David Wolfe
#51. 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.
Bill Joy
#52. 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.
Lore Sjoberg
#53. UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
Dennis Ritchie
#54. Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad.
Rob Pike
#55. Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
Neal Stephenson
#56. I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.
Donald Knuth
#57. UTSL, which Maxine at first takes for an anagram of LUST or possibly SLUT but later learns is Unix for Use The Source, Luke.
Thomas Pynchon
#58. On a UNIX system, everything is a file; if something is not a file, it is a process.
Machtelt Garrels
#59. 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.
Larry Wall
#60. What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.
Erik Naggum
#61. It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.
Dennis Ritchie
#62. 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.
Eric S. Raymond
#63. There is a flip side to this. In the Unix world, libraries which are delivered as libraries should come with exerciser programs.
Eric S. Raymond
#64. 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.
Kenneth P. Thompson
#65. I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
Ken Thompson
#66. The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It's pretty shocking to me.
Jaron Lanier
#67. HP-UX is a pretty good implementation of BSD, although it's not as featureful as SunOS.
John R. Levine
#68. Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.
Vernor Vinge
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