These UNIX quotes will motivate you. Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.
Below you will find a collection of inspiring, happy, and encouraging UNIX quotes, UNIX sayings, and UNIX proverbs.
Best UNIX Quotes
- “UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.” ~ Dennis Ritchie
- “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.” ~ Douglas McIlroy
- “Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.” ~ Douglas Gwyn
- “UNIX has a philosophy, it has 25 years of history behind it, and most importantly, it has a clean core. It strives for something – some kind of beauty. And that’s really what struck me as a programmer. Operating systems that normal home users are used to, such as DOS and Windows, didn’t have any way of life. Nobody tried to design Windows – it just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it. […] I don’t think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think that they make really crappy operating systems.” ~ Linus Torvalds
-
“If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it’s done.” ~ Scott Adams
- “Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself – and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure.” ~ Eric Allman
- “I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.” ~ Bill Joy
- “I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot.” ~ Jamie Zawinski
- “I think Unix is a great system – especially for running data centers – because it is very mature, very reliable, very scalable. But when I want to go out and populate small devices, I think Java.” ~ Bill Joy
-
“I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.” ~ Ken Thompson
- “Unix is back in vogue.” ~ Murphy J. Foster, Jr.
- “The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.” ~ Dennis Ritchie
- “It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.” ~ Dennis Ritchie
- “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.” ~ Eric S. Raymond
-
“Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.” ~ Henry Spencer
- “I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, “We left all that stuff out of Unix. If there’s an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, ‘Hey, reboot it.'”” ~ Tom Van Vleck
- “UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity.” ~ Dennis Ritchie
- “Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.” ~ Dennis Ritchie
- “If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot
of different places, just write a Unix operating system.” ~ Linus Torvalds -
“Most hackers graduate from Unix and Linux platforms. They know them intimately. They don’t try to exploit them” ~ Dean Stockwell
- “Everything that I’ve learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won’t work, but if you find the right wizard, they can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won’t. PC/Windows: You think it won’t work, and it won’t.” ~ Philip Greenspun
- “Huh? Windows was designed to keep the idiots away from Unix so we could hack in peace. Let’s not break that.” ~ Tom Christiansen
- “Many say that DOS is the dark side [from Star Wars], but actually UNIX is more like the dark side: It’s less likely to find the one way to destroy your incredibly powerful machine, and more likely to make upper management choke.” ~ Lore Sjoberg
- “In my experience, telling someone to switch Unix shells for ease of use is like telling him to switch cigarette brands for his health.” ~ Chris Espinosa
-
“Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded their reinvention.” ~ Larry Wall
- “Not only is UNIX dead, it’s starting to smell really bad.” ~ Rob Pike
- “Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.” ~ Dennis Ritchie
- “Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX.” ~ Dennis Ritchie
- “Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.” ~ Neal Stephenson
-
“Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX.” ~ Tom Christiansen
- “GNU, which stands for Gnu’s Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.” ~ Richard Stallman
- “I must say the Linux community is a lot nicer than the Unix community. A negative comment on Unix would warrent death threats. With Linux, it is like stirring up a nest of butterflies.” ~ Kenneth P. Thompson
- “I do believe that in a race, it is naive to think Linux has a hope of making a dent against Microsoft starting from way behind with a fraction of the resources and amateur labor. (I feel the same about Unix.” ~ Kenneth P. Thompson
- “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.” ~ Andrew S. Tanenbaum
-
“UNIX is a user-friendly operating system.
It just picks its friends more carefully than others.” ~ David Wolfe
- “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.” ~ Andrew S. Tanenbaum
- “How much does it cost to entice a dope-smoking UNIX system guru to Dayton?” ~ Brian Boyle
- “Unix is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs.” ~ Dave Cutler
- “Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement.” ~ Hal Abelson
-
“Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac and nobody cares about it.” ~ Bill Joy
- “I changed the Linux copyright license to be the GPL some time in the first half of 1992. Mostly because I had hated the lack of a cheaply and easily available UNIX when I had looked for one a year before.” ~ Linus Torvalds
- “From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it’s clear that people should be looking beyond it.” ~ Dennis Ritchie
- “I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.” ~ Donald Knuth
- “I am confident that we can do better than GUIs because the basic problem with them (and with the Linux and Unix interfaces) is that they ask a human being to do things that we know experimentally humans cannot do well. The question I asked myself is, given everything we know about how the human mind works, could we design a computer and computer software so that we can work with the least confusion and greatest efficiency?” ~ Jef Raskin
-
“Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.” ~ Rob Pike
- “It’s true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate.” ~ Dennis Ritchie
- “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.” ~ Eric S. Raymond
- “The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way… However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That’s why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that’s out there.” ~ Bill Joy
- “Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C’s predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.” ~ Dennis Ritchie
-
“Unix in particular is very poor at network printing.” ~ Michael Sweet
- “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.” ~ Linus Torvalds
- “C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new” ~ Dennis Ritchie
- “Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim.” ~ Darl McBride
- “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.” ~ Eric S. Raymond
-
“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.” ~ Larry Wall
- “What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.” ~ Erik Naggum
- “When we take a top-tier view of the amount of code showing up inside of Linux today that is either directly related to our Unix System 5 that we directly own or is related to one of our flavors of Unix that we have derivative works rights over–we don’t necessarily own those flavors, but we have control rights over how that information gets disseminated–the amount is substantial. We’re not talking about just lines of code; we’re talking about entire programs. We’re talking about hundred [sic] of thousands of lines of code.” ~ Darl McBride
