His name shows up everywhere in the Unix bibliography but I'll be honest — I've used A Quarter Century of Unix mostly as a lookup for specific stories rather than reading it cover-to-cover. For folks who read it as it came out: where would you point someone today who wants the full sweep? It's hard to tell from outside which of his books hold up as essential vs. which show their age.
Tangent, but: is anyone doing comparable oral-history work for the current LLM moment? It feels like a lot of it is going to survive only as scattered blog posts and conference talks, and I don't know who's playing the role Salus did for Unix.
10 comments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_H._Salus
We should honor these people when they turn 80, then they get to see all the love and respect themselves!
His name shows up everywhere in the Unix bibliography but I'll be honest — I've used A Quarter Century of Unix mostly as a lookup for specific stories rather than reading it cover-to-cover. For folks who read it as it came out: where would you point someone today who wants the full sweep? It's hard to tell from outside which of his books hold up as essential vs. which show their age.
Tangent, but: is anyone doing comparable oral-history work for the current LLM moment? It feels like a lot of it is going to survive only as scattered blog posts and conference talks, and I don't know who's playing the role Salus did for Unix.
RIP. I've actually found the Handbook of Programming Languages (4 volumes) that he edited much more useful than his Unix history.
I met him in a few conferences, back in the day. We ended up talking more about linguistics than Unix history, somehow.
During college, his Unix history book was the first one I read that actually made the AT&T => BSD => linux throughline make sense. RIP.
He was also executive director of both the USENIX Association in its very early years.
RIP a legend. Thanks for preserving Unix history.
Rest in peace, Mister Salus.
Quarter century of UNIX sounds interesting.
I found at least 1 copy in the Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/aquartercenturyofunixpeterh.salu...
The cover looks redacted, as the "Sex, Drugs" from "Sex, Drugs, Unix" was removed. Hopefully the content wasn't censored as well.
RIP a goat