Re: [TUHS] a book (was Re: PWB vs Unix/TS)

On 2019-09-14 17:58, Adam Thornton wrote: I think Peter's work was an amazing effort to collect and disseminate facts, and despite a few gaps (inevitable) he did a great job. But Peter's works were more collections of facts than attempts to interpret, contextualize, or otherwise put the facts into a larger narrative. Honest historians can disagree on the role of written histories. A pure "just the facts ma'am" history avoids context and interpretation but tends to be fairly dry. This was Peter's approach. But it's impossible to completely avoid bias because you have to pick and choose the facts you include. Contextualizing history inevitably leads to interpretation which leads to some amount of bias, but interesting or even gripping histories read like a novel that unfolds before you. I've believed for a long time that when the definitive history of Unix is written, Peter's books will be a major (albeit not "primary", in the technical sense) source material. I salute him for all his hard (and early) work. I hope that someone will step up to do this larger history (much of which happened after Peter's publication dates) before we all die off. And I have to say, It looks like Warner's research (with all the abundant help from this group) the last week or two is amazing. I've learned tons of stuff I didn't know, some of which didn't match my memory, e.g., about generations of *roff. As the author of the -me macro package, I'm probably one of the handful of people in the world who have ever used every feature in [nt]roff, many of which looked crazy until I needed them, when they suddenly seemed to be genius. I deeply regret that I never had an opportunity to meet Joe Ossanna. eric