The Creation of the Unix Operating System

If you like that, you'll love The UNIX Haters Handbook

http://m.simson.net/ugh.pdf

And rebuttal: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=538

I thought his discussion of the Linux Hater's Blog, http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=628 , was even better.

ADDED: Also the Linux Hater's Blog is still going if only intermittently, http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/

Dennis Ritchie's anti-forward was the best part.

I'm sorry but I had to make this into one big document. Point your "Read Later" here: http://pastebin.com/6dB9bXDr

Thank you!

It's not that UNIX is so great. It's that everything else is so much worse. When things suck bad enough, someone does something about it. (As it was with Multics... after all these years, people are still pushing more crap systems on us, forcing us to retreat to UNIX.) When you delve into this OS you break free from all of the crap and, if you stick with it, you can actually see that things can be made simple. Quite refreshing, I think.

Beware the complexifiers, people who want to make simple things complex. They are like the Snark. Lurking in every tree.

This article is outdated. For a pictorial story that's always current, I refer you to... http://www.levenez.com/unix/

It's outdated to the extent it is, in itself, a piece of history.