Re: [TUHS] Ideas for a Unix paper I'm writing - TUHS

29 Jun 2011

...
  All, IEEE Spectrum have asked me to write a paper on
Unix to celebrate the
 40th anniversary of the release of 1st Edition in November 1971. I'm after
 ideas & suggestions! 
of course this quote is always good for a chuckle:

Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were
redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e."
[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kenneth_Thompson]

and I always liked this quote from Linus Torvalds:

On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Rik van Riel wrote:

...
  The real issue here is paradigms. The classical
"everything's
 a file" broke down with the advent of networking, sockets and
 non-blocking reads. At the moment the file paradigm is so much
 out of touch with computational reality that web servers need
 to fork for each client and people are crying out for asynchronous
 sendfile and other weird interfaces. 
Sure. But I think it's still a valid paradigm to consider "everything is a
stream of bytes". And that's _really_ what the UNIX paradigm has been from
the first: the whole notion of pipes etc is not all that different from
networking.

[http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/msg/7bcbbfeaea2b93c9?hl=en&a…]

...
  I'm also trying to chase down some quotes; my
memory seems to be failing me
 but I'm sure I've seen these somewhere: 
ugh..my memory is failing too at the moment. I'm sure I once read a
nice rant of sorts about how Unix has proven to be of sound design
that has adapted well to changes in the computing landscape...