16 Sep
2019
16 Sep
'19
2:12 a.m.
On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 12:16 AM Eric Allman <tuhs(a)eric.allman.name> wrote:
On 2019-09-14 17:58, Adam Thornton wrote:
+1 Amen, bro.
For many of us that lived the time he covered, which was the first 25
years, it's awesome and frankly, I don't look for it for insights, as that
was to me not what he was after doing. He was trying to create a
narrative that documented what happened. Yes, he left things out, but
pretty much go it right.
I...have never been all that impressed with
Salus's work. It's not
_bad_ but it's also not terribly
insightful.
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.
I agree. Moreover, as Jon points out, I'm not sure even if was made widely
available, other than people like those on this list, I'm not sure it will
be really that interesting.
But it's impossible to completely avoid bias
because you have to pick and
choose the facts you include.
And this is the biggest issue. And I have observed (maybe I'm wrong - but
it seems to me ...) that the people that I know today, that dislike Peter's
work dislike that Linux is not huge part of it. Or more importantly that
it was the emergence of the *Internet and UNIX that were enablers for Linux*.
As Jon has suggested, it should not be Gnu/Linux but rather Internet/Linux.
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.e.* Peter is not David McCullough and we don't seem to have David coming
to us to write his next book.
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.
Absolutely. It needs to be the place where a historian starts.
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.
+1 A louder *amen*....
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 agree - as much as I offered some additions and corrections it is well
done -- thank you, Warner.
.... I deeply regret that I never had an opportunity
to meet Joe Ossanna.
Indeed.