Ken Thompson - Unix Quotes

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I must say the Linux community is a lot nicer than the Unix community. A negative comment on Unix would warrent death threats. With Linux, it is like stirring up a nest of butterflies.

Ken Thompson
Unix was a very small, understandable OS, so people could change it at their will. It would run itself—you could type "go" and in a few minutes it would recompile itself. You had total control over the whole system. So it was very beneficial to a lot of people, especially at universities, because it was very hard to teach computing from an IBM end-user point of view. Unix was small, and you could go through it line by line and understand exactly how it worked. That was the origin of the so-called Unix culture.

Ken Thompson
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

Ken Thompson
I do believe that in a race, it is naive to think Linux has a hope of making a dent against Microsoft starting from way behind with a fraction of the resources and amateur labor. (I feel the same about Unix.)

Ken Thompson
Anything new will have to come along with the type of revolution that came along with Unix. Nothing was going to topple IBM until something came along that made them irrelevant. I'm sure they have the mainframe market locked up, but that's just irrelevant. And the same thing with Microsoft: until something comes along that makes them irrelevant, the entry fee is too difficult and they won't be displaced.

Ken Thompson
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."

Ken Thompson