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Unix Quotes

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Unix Quotes

“Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.”

CultureComputer ScienceComputersUnixHacker Folklore
Author:Neal Stephenson
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“I once worked on a project in which a software product originally written for UNIX was being redesigned and implemented on Windows NT. Most of the programming team consisted of programmers who had great facility with Windows and Microsoft Visual C++. In no time at all, it seemed, they had generated many screens full of windows and toolbars and dialogues, all with connections to networks and data sources, thousands and thousands of lines of code. But when the inevitable difficulties of debugging came, they seemed at sea. In the face of the usual weird and and unexplainable outcomes, they stood agog. It was left to the UNIX-trained programmers to fix things. The UNIX team members were accustomed to not knowing. Their view of programming as language-as-text gave them the patience to look slowly through the code. In the end, the overall 'productivity' of the system, the fact that it came into being at all, was not the handiwork of tools that sought to make programming seem easy, but the work of engineers who had no fear of 'hard.”

ProgrammingMicrosoftUnix
Book:Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology
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“It's times like this when the age of the universe becomes a useful unit of measurement: 64-bit Unix time will last until twenty-one times the age of the universe from now - until (assuming we don't manage another upgrade in the meantime) December 4 in the year 292,277,026,596 CE, when all the computers will go down. On a Sunday.”

Unix64 Bit SystemsAge Of The UniverseUnix Time
Book:Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors
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“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.”

TodayLinesViewsTalkingRightsInformationAmountHundredProgramCodeRelatedFlavorNot TalkingShowing UpDerivativesLinuxUnix
Author:Darl McBride
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“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.”

ThinkingWayYearsKindPhilosophyHomeUsedEvilBehindsDesignGrewNormalWindowCleanStriveCoreUsersStrifeMicrosoftProgrammersOperating SystemsUnix
Author:Linus Torvalds
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“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?”

KnowsMindHumansWellsProblemAsksGivenCan DoHuman BeingsDesignComputerConfusionHuman MindSoftwareEfficiencyLinuxInterfacesUnixComputer Software
Author:Jef Raskin
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“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.”

FirstsPersonsBookRealTogetherForceCareersPlansInfluenceMastersComputerBasesChessPhenomenonPredecessorsEndgameUnix
Author:Dennis Ritchie
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“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.”

YearsFirstsHomeIndividualTalkingEnvironmentDevelopmentInternetTenCapableFirst TimeCapacityMachinesEnginesStorageHackersUnix
Book:The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
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