Unix Quotes
Unix Quote of the day
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done.
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
UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity.
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
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.
Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.
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.
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.
Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself - and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure.
Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.
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.
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.
Most hackers graduate from Unix and Linux platforms. They know them intimately. They don't try to exploit them
Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement.
UNIX is a user-friendly operating system. It just picks its friends more carefully than others.
In my experience, telling someone to switch Unix shells for ease of use is like telling him to switch cigarette brands for his health.
Huh? Windows was designed to keep the idiots away from Unix so we could hack in peace. Let's not break that.
Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention.
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.
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.
What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.
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.
Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim.
Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac and nobody cares about it.