QUOTES FROM 'THE ART OF UNIX PROGRAMMING'
Eric S. Raymond -
http://www.catb.org/~esr/
Publisher: Pearson Education, Inc.
ISBN: 0-13-142901-9
Also available for online reading at esr's website.
[Dennis] Ritchie observes: "What we wanted to preserve was not just
a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which
a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of
communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines,
is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but
to encourage close communication". The theme of computers being viewed
not merely as logic devices but as the nuclei of communities was in
the air; 1969 was also the year of the ARPANET (the direct ancestor of
today's Internet) was invented. The theme of "fellowship" would resonate
all through Unix's subsequent history.
- chapter 2.1 - Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995, page 31
Open-source activists welcomed the surge of immigrants from
everywhere. The old Unix hands began to share the new imigrants' dreams
of not merely passively out-enduring the Microsoft monopoly, but
actually reclaiming key markets from it. The open-source community as a
whole prepared a major push for mainstream respectability, and began to
welcome alliances with major corporations that increasingly feared
losing control of their own businesses as Microsoft's lock-in tactics
grew even bolder.
- chapter 2.4 - The Lessons of Unix History, page 51
