Unix Quotes - Page 2

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

Tom Christiansen

Idiot, Window, Break

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

Rob Pike

Smell, Programming, Starting

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

Larry Wall

Wheels, Reinvention

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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

Writing, Names, Giving

Richard Stallman (2002). “Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman”, p.27, Lulu.com

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

Neal Stephenson

Operating Systems, Oral History

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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

Stars, Powerful, War

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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

Use, Shells, Ease

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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

Feet, Hey, Tolls

Usenet article "Script to center text", groups.google.com. August 13, 1992.

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

Darl McBride

Heritage, Linux, Claims

"Geeks on Bikes: The SCO Group/Caldera Product Development Plan". www.linuxjournal.com. August 28, 2002.

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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.

Darl McBride

Rights, Views, Talking

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Unix in particular is very poor at network printing.

Michael Sweet

Printing, Poor, Particular

"Engineers approve standardization of Internet Printing Protocol" by Carolyn Duffy Marsan, www.cnn.com. July 12, 2000.

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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

Successful, Admire, Horrible

"Using Lisp to Call another program in linux?". Usenet discussion groups, groups.google.com. November 11, 2002.

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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

Different, Machines, Portability

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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.

Eric S. Raymond

Home, Talking, Years

Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.13, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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Unix is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs.

Dave Cutler

Junk, Phds, Programming

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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

People, Bells, Maelstrom

"Clearing Up Some Misconceptions". "Ken Brown's Motivation, Release 1.2", www.cs.vu.nl. May 21, 2004.

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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

Butterfly, Community, Negative

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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

Believe, Thinking, Race

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

Bill Joy

Running, Care, Today

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

Brian Boyle

Humorous, Dope, Smoking

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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

Names, Numbers, Doe

"Modern Operating Systems". Book by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, 1992.

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

Hal Abelson

Should Have, Achievement, Taste

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It's true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate.

Dennis Ritchie

Ideas, Today, Niche

Source: genius.cat-v.org

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

Rob Pike

Listening, Language, Programming

"Rob Pike Responds". Slashdot Interview, interviews.slashdot.org. October 18, 2004.

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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?

Jef Raskin

Confusion, Design, Mind

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