Eric S. Raymond Quotes (13 Quotes)

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.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.

Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.

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.

A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.

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.

Traditionally, operating systems had been written in tight assembler to extract the absolute highest efficiency possible out of their host machines.

Worse, by the early 1990s it was becoming clear that ten years of effort to commercialize proprietary Unix was ending in failure.

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.

In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.

The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.

Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.