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A Quarter Century of UNIX
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Author: Peter H. Salus
List Price: $31.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201547775
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (31 May, 1994)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 105,017
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
Overview of the Unix World
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 Part two, Birth of a System, tells the story about how Unix came to be with what today is seen as much outdated hardware.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.
Rating: 4 out of 5
The birth of UNIX from an insider
A lively and impeccably well informed history of the birth of UNIX. It's not perfect, but it's still the best source around.
Rating: 1 out of 5
don't loose your money
The really expensive little book lacks coherence and it is difficult to follow due to the full of citations and data piled up and left as row material page after page.
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