Quotes & Sayings About Unix

Unix is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate the simplicity.. — Dennis Ritchie

I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated. — Bill Joy

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

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

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

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

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

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

On a UNIX system, everything is a file; if something is not a file, it is a process. — Machtelt Garrels

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

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

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

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

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. — G. Pascal Zachary

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

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? — Jef Raskin

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

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

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

Unix in particular is very poor at network printing. — Michael Sweet

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

Unix is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs. — Dave Cutler

CSV (fields separated by commas, double quotes used to escape commas, no continuation lines) is rarely found under Unix. — Eric S. Raymond

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

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

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

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

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

I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof. — Donald Knuth

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

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. — Neal Stephenson

Unix is back in vogue. — Murphy J. Foster Jr.

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

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

Forget UNIX - it will be gone in 5 years. — Tom Jermoluk

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

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

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

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

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

there are some problems no Unix command can address. — Aeleen Frisch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ASAP has helped IBM take more than $150 million worth of Unix business from Sun since its inception. — James Larkin

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. — Darl McBride

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

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

HP-UX is a pretty good implementation of BSD, although it's not as featureful as SunOS. — John R. Levine

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

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

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

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

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. — Bill Joy

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

When you see the right thing, do it - this may look like more work in the short term, but it's the path of least effort in the long run. If you don't know what the right thing is, do the minimum necessary to get the job done, at least until you figure out what the right thing is. To do the Unix philosophy right, you have to be loyal to excellence. You have to believe that software design is a craft worth all the intelligence, creativity, and passion you can muster. Otherwise you won't look past the easy, stereotyped ways of approaching design and implementation; you'll rush into coding when you should be thinking. You'll carelessly complicate when you should be relentlessly simplifying - and then you'll wonder why your code bloats and debugging is so hard. — Eric S. Raymond

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

Unix, BSD, Linux, Mac OS, Windows are Monozukuri. — Mehmet Kececi

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

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

Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement. — Hal Abelson