Unix Quotes

“Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.”
― Neal Stephenson

“Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

“UTSL, which Maxine at first takes for an anagram of LUST or possibly SLUT but later learns is Unix for “Use The Source, Luke.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

“HP-UX is a pretty good implementation of BSD, although it's not as featureful as SunOS.”
― John R. Levine, Margaret Levine Young, UNIX for Dummies

“I’m glad someone’s finally giving ed the attention it deserves.”
―  Ken Thompson

“One does not simply Telnet into Mordor.”
― Memes

“I once worked on a project in which a software product originally written for UNIX was being redesigned and implemented on Windows NT. Most of the programming team consisted of programmers who had great facility with Windows and Microsoft Visual C++. In no time at all, it seemed, they had generated many screens full of windows and toolbars and dialogues, all with connections to networks and data sources, thousands and thousands of lines of code. But when the inevitable difficulties of debugging came, they seemed at sea. In the face of the usual weird and and unexplainable outcomes, they stood agog. It was left to the UNIX-trained programmers to fix things. The UNIX team members were accustomed to not knowing. Their view of programming as language-as-text gave them the patience to look slowly through the code. In the end, the overall 'productivity' of the system, the fact that it came into being at all, was not the handiwork of tools that sought to make programming seem easy, but the work of engineers who had no fear of 'hard.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“It's times like this when the age of the universe becomes a useful unit of measurement: 64-bit Unix time will last until twenty-one times the age of the universe from now - until (assuming we don't manage another upgrade in the meantime) December 4 in the year 292,277,026,596 CE, when all the computers will go down. On a Sunday.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors