Unix Quotes

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

  Douglas Gwyn

  Clever, Stupid, Technology

  "Introducing Regular Expressions". Book by Michael Fitzgerald, 2012.

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• 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.

  Douglas McIlroy

  Philosophy, Writing, Working Together

  "The Unix Oral History Project". Interview with Michael S. Mahoney, www.princeton.edu.

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

  Dennis Ritchie

  Simple, Simplicity, Genius

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

  Henry Spencer

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

  Scott Adams

  Technology, Done, Condescension And

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

  Bill Joy

  Tired, Editors, People

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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.

  Linus Torvalds

  Philosophy, Home, Thinking

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

  Eric Allman

  Funny, Couple, Science

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• 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

  Thinking, Alternatives, Today

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• 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

  Running, Thinking, Data

  "Creating One Huge Computer". Interview with Spencer Reiss, www.wired.com. July 15, 1998.

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

  Dennis Ritchie

  Important, Bells, Labs

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• Unix is back in vogue.

  Murphy J. Foster, Jr.

  Vogue

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

  Ken Thompson

  Writing, Thinking, Simple

  "Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson". Computer 32 (5), (pp. 58-64), May 1999.

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

  Dennis Ritchie

  Numbers, Expected, Installation

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

  Dennis Ritchie

  Certain, Software, Portability

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• 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

  Thinking, Stories, Might

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.15, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• 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

  Writing, Recovery, Errors

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

  Dennis Ritchie

  Simple, Appreciate, Simplicity

  "Unix: A Dialectic". Book by Dennis Ritchie, 1989.

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• 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

  Writing, Different, World

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

  Dean Stockwell

  Trying, Linux, Graduates

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

  Dennis Ritchie

  Two, Use, Two Things

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

  David Wolfe

  Friendly, Operating Systems, Picks

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• 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

  Thinking, Principles, Three

  Philip Greenspun (1999). “Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing”, p.202, Morgan Kaufmann

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

  Dennis Ritchie

  Years, Linux, Research

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

  Tom Christiansen

  Nice, Operating Systems

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