Unix Quotes

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write. (Ken Thompson)
Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix. View quote
Theo de Raadt
I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated. View quote
Bill Joy
I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof. View quote
Donald Knuth
So I would not be surprised if the globbing libraries, for example, will do NFD-mangling in order to glob "correctly", so even programs ported from real Unix might end up getting pathnames subtly changed into NFD as part of some hot library-on-library action with UTF hackery inside. View quote
Linus Torvalds
Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement. View quote
Hal Abelson
Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time. View quote
Larry Wall
UNIX does not allow path names to be prefixed by a drive name or number; that would be precisely the kind of device dependence that operating systems ought to eliminate. View quote
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring. View quote
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
This is the Unix philosophy. Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. View quote
Doug McIlroy
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)
I must say the Linux community is a lot nicer than the Unix community. A negative comment on Unix would warrant death threats. With Linux, it is like stirring up a nest of butterflies. View quote
Ken Thompson
It does everything Unix does only less reliably. View quote
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. View quote
Ken Thompson
For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe. View quote
Eric S. Raymond
Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic. View quote
Neal Stephenson
Your problem has nothing to do with git, and everything to do with emacs. And then you have the gall to talk about "Unix design" and not gumming programs together, when you yourself use the most gummed-up piece of absolute sh*t there is! View quote
Linus Torvalds
My own computational world is a strange blend of Plan 9, Windows, and Inferno. I very much admire Linux's growth and vigor. Occasionally, people ask me much the same question [about Linux], but posed in a way that seems to expect an answer that shows jealousy or irritation about Linux vs. Unix as delivered and branded by traditional companies. Not at all; I think of both as the continuation of ideas that were started by Ken and me and many others, many years ago. View quote
Dennis Ritchie
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity. (Dennis Ritchie)
UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity. View quote
Dennis Ritchie
I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be the among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as the more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers. View quote
Dennis Ritchie
I don't really distinguish between Linux and things that are more or less direct descendants of Unix. I think they're all the same at some level. Often, people ask me, "Do you feel jealous about Linux being the big thing." And the answer is no, for the same reason. I think they're the same. View quote
Dennis Ritchie
If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done. View quote
Scott Adams