A Quote by Neal Stephenson
Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
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Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX.
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
Moreover, it is so important that people have the opportunity to share their stories and have them documented. There have been large-scale oral history projects after many events, from September 11th to Hurricane Katrina. Many oral history projects are much more confined, but equally valuable. We can learn about different working conditions, living conditions, trauma experiences and much more through oral history.
UNIX always presumes you know what you're doing. You're the human being, after all, and it is a mere operating system.
UNIX is a user-friendly operating system.
It just picks its friends more carefully than others.
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.
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.
My book, Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research is about how researchers use this method and how to write up their oral history projects so that audiences can read them. It's important that researchers have many different tools available to study people's lives and the cultures we live in. I think oral history is a most needed and uniquely important strategy.
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.
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.
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.
How much does it cost to entice a dope-smoking UNIX system guru to Dayton?
Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel - that pretty much the entire Internet runs on - is written in C.
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.
Oral history is a research method. It is a way of conducting long, highly detailed interviews with people about their life experiences, often in multiple interview sessions. Oral history allows the person being interviewed to use their own language to talk about events in their life and the method is used by researchers in different fields like history, anthropology and sociology.
I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written
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