Unix Quotes
The best sayings about Unix that you can share on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and other social networks!
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Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention.
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UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
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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?
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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.
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Unix is back in vogue.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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UNIX is a user-friendly operating system. It just picks its friends more carefully than others.
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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
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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.
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Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself - and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure.
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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.'"
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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.
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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.
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Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.
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Unix in particular is very poor at network printing.
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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.
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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.
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Unix is not so much an operating system as an 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.
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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.
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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.
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Huh? Windows was designed to keep the idiots away from Unix so we could hack in peace. Let's not break that.
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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.
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Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX.
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