Unix quotes:

Send

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done. -- Scott Adams
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
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
Unix in particular is very poor at network printing. -- Michael Sweet
Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history. -- Neal Stephenson
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -- Henry Spencer
Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20. -- Dennis Ritchie
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand 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
Unix is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate the simplicity.. -- Dennis Ritchie
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
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
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
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 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
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
Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad. -- Rob Pike
The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected... -- Dennis Ritchie
UNIX is a user-friendly operating system. It just picks its friends more carefully than others. -- David Wolfe
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write. -- Ken Thompson
Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor. -- Dennis Ritchie
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
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
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
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
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
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
Unix is back in vogue. -- Murphy J. Foster, Jr.
Unix is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs. -- Dave Cutler
Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention. -- Larry Wall
Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy. -- Rob Pike
ASAP has helped IBM take more than $150 million worth of Unix business from Sun since its inception. -- James Larkin
Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac and nobody cares about it. -- Bill Joy
Most hackers graduate from Unix and Linux platforms. They know them intimately. They don't try to exploit them -- Dean Stockwell
It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software. -- Dennis Ritchie
Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself - and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure. -- Eric Allman
Huh? Windows was designed to keep the idiots away from Unix so we could hack in peace. Let's not break that. -- Tom Christiansen
Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Douglas Gwyn
Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement. -- Hal Abelson
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
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 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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX. -- Tom Christiansen
I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof. -- Donald Knuth
Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX, -- Dennis Ritchie
How much does it cost to entice a dope-smoking UNIX system guru to Dayton? -- Brian Boyle
Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim. -- Darl McBride
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

Send