Customer Reviews

A Quarter Century of UNIX

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is an expensive short book with mainly trivial chronological information, 90% of which are freely available on the Internet. As for the history of the first 25 year of Unix it is both incomplete and superficial. Salus is reasonably good as a facts collector (although for a person with his level of access to the Unix pioneers he looks extremely lazy and he essentially missed an opportunity to write a real history, setting for a glossy superficial chronology instead). He probably just felt the market need for such a book and decided to fill the niche.

In my humble opinion Salus lucks real understanding of the technical and social dynamics of Unix development, understanding that can be found, say, in chapter "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix from AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable" in the book "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (O'Reilly, 1999)" (available online). The extended version of this chapter will be published in the second edition of "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System (Unix and Open Systems Series)" which I highly recommend (I read a preprint at Usenix.)

In any case Kirk McKusick is a real insider, not a former Usenix bureaucrat like Salus. Salus was definitely close to the center of the events; but it is unclear to what extent he understood the events he was close to.

Unix history is a very interesting example how interests of military (DAPRA) shape modern technical projects (not always to the detriment of technical quality, quite opposite in case of Unix) and how DAPRA investment in Unix created completely unforeseen side effect: BSD Unix that later became the first free/open Unix ever (Net2 tape and then Free/Open/NetBSD distributions). Another interesting side of Unix history is that AT&T brass never understood what a jewel they have in hands.

Salus's Usenix position prevented him from touching many bitter conflicts that litter the first 25 years of Unix, including personal conflicts. The reader should be advised that the book represents "official" version of history, and that Salus is, in essence, a court historian, a person whose main task is to put gloss on the events, he is writing about. As far as I understand, Salus never strays from this very safe position.

Actually Unix created a new style of computing, a new way of thinking of how to attack a problem with a computer. This style was essentially the first successful component model in programming. As Frederick P. Brooks Jr (another computer pioneer who early recognized the importance of pipes) noted, the creators of Unix "...attacked the accidental difficulties that result from using individual programs together, by providing integrated libraries, unified file formats, and pipes and filters.". As a non-programmer, in no way Salus is in the position to touch this important side of Unix. The book contains standard and trivial praise for pipes, without understanding of full scope and limitations of this component programming model...

I can also attest that as a historian, Peter Salus can be extremely boring: this July I was unfortunate enough to sit on one of his talks, when he essentially stole from Kirk McKusick more then an hour (out of two scheduled for BSD history section at this year Usenix Technical Conference ) with some paternalistic trivia insulting the intelligence of the Usenix audience, instead of a short 10 min introduction he was expected to give; only after he eventually managed to finish, Kirk McKusick made a really interesting, but necessarily short (he had only 50 minutes left :-) presentation about history of BSD project, which was what this session was about.

In 1969 the Unix operating system was born. The main developers were Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, two programmers at Bell Telephone Labs. Unix was born because of the cancellation of another operating system developed at BTL, Multics. Learning from the experience they gained from Multics, Thompson and Ritchie began working on Unix, which would later prove to be a good choice. At first they used the PDP-7 machine, assembler language, and the programming language B (by Dennis Ritchie). Only later did BTL upgrade to PDP-11. Because of the upgrade and because of the development of the C programming language, Unix could mature.

The book has six parts: Genesis, Birth of a System, What makes UNIX Unix?, Unix Spreads and Blossoms, The Unix Industry, and The Currents of Change. In the first part, Peter Salus introduces us to Thompson and Ritchie; there's also a chapter on computers in general. Part two, Birth of a System, tells the story about how Unix came to be with what today is seen as much outdated hardware. Later parts give information on the many companies and groups involved in the Unix history, most notably the development of the BSD systems.

Peter Salus has been involved in the Unix history himself, and therefore he writes about it with sympathetic understanding. That means that we don't get introduced properly to the persons. And it means that the pages are full of acronyms. The writing is very compact and full of quotes from interviews, magazines, books and other sources, and that makes the book difficult to read. The book also has some minor errors.

But if you can live with these flaws, "A Quarter Century of Unix" is a good read. It gives an overview of the Unix world, and shows that Linux is just a small part of the whole operating system landscape, and that there are alternatives.

By far the coolest book on Unix!!

The little stories on Unix are amazing.

e.g. Bill Joy's start of BSD distribution or Steve Johnson's lex and yacc development. This book is full of zany characters that we just know names of. This book gives a picture of their personality. The best of the lot are of
Ken T, Dennis R, Robert Morris, Bill Joy, McKusick, and the rest of the looney unix toons. These guys are awesome. A must read for any Unix Lover.

This book is an excellent overview of the history of Unix. It will help you to understand how Unix came to be, and how it came to be split up into so many different versions. A must for every Unix nerd.

This is a very good, very carefully researched, and a must-read for anyone who ever even wondered about the history of Unix.

However, I can't get over the price -- like US$30 for a pretty thin little book that's simply a for-fun read.

There are numerous reference books for Unix, the operating system of choice for the computer-aware. This book, though, brings Unix to life. The rich and storied history of Ken's and Dennis' baby is covered in detail along with pictures of the major players. (Apparently facial hair was a defacto standard. Maybe ZZ Top spent some time in Murray Hill, eh?) Even if you already know Unix, Salus does a wonderful job in helping you *appreciate* this elegant, robust, powerful and selectively-friendly operating system.

UNIX: Live free or die!

A lively and impeccably well informed history of the birth of UNIX. It's not perfect, but it's still the best source around.

This is one of my favorite books! I was saddened to hear yesterday that Dennis Ritchie (father of C, co-creator Unix) has passed away. I highly recommend it for anyone looking to relive some of the amazing anecdotes of these trailblazers.

This isn't really a big-picture history of Unix, it's more a collection of excerpts of interviews with a bunch of people, arranged in roughly chronological order. Between each excerpt is a few paragraphs or pages that gives the context for the next excerpt. It covers the period from 1969 to 1994, although it seems like everything after 1980 is breezed through in the last part of the book. Things like the various window systems or the workstation wars of the '80s and early '90s are alluded to if they're mentioned at all.

It felt like the author was too close to his subject matter, as this book leans heavily towards people he knew personally or events he was involved with. Anything else is barely mentioned. The end result is, you have a book where the vast majority of the page count is covering the period from 1969-1980, and a really surprising number of the pages are just retellings of a similar story told over and over again:

"Professor X at University Y heard about Unix from Z, so he called up Ken Thompson personally to get ahold of a V4 tape, but then when he got the tape, his department didn't want to shell out for another minicomputer to run it on, so Professor X hacked the software so he could boot it on some old/unused/novel machine that he already had. Everyone in the CS department fell in love with Unix afterwards, and soon were using troff to write all of their papers."

Seriously, I don't know what the actual page count is, but I could swear that like half of this book is a variation on that story told over and over again for various faculty members or scientists at various universities or research facilities. And it feels like that's 90% of the book. Although I'm being harsh, I'm still giving it three stars, because the subject matter is inherently fascinating to me, and it does contain a lot of anecdotes and personal perspectives that you simply will not find anywhere else. I just wish it were more of a focused, researched history that hit the important points and dropped some of the minutiae. Instead it feels like quite a bit of minutiae that doesn't really try to identify any big picture narrative in the history of the OS. It's a short book and a quick read to begin with, so it was surprising and frustrating that the author didn't try to make it more concise and balanced given the low page count.

This book is the first one I read about the history on Unix and I really appreciate the author's for the taking the time trying to preserve the history about Unix before it is lost. The book starts with a very early mention of computers, from 1870s and then ends with around the year 1994. Of course keep in mind that this is a Unix history and not Linux. And because it is published in 1994 do not expect it to tell you the history of Unix of the past decade. The book, however, cover the Unix history from 1969 till 1994 extensively.
The one thing that I did not like about the book - and it is very minor - was that the quoted text should have been italicized. Sometimes during the reading I would get confused as to whether the author is talking or he is quoting someone else. Other than that minor inconvenience the book is worth to look at.