On 2019-09-14 17:58, Adam Thornton wrote:
> 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.
+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.
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.