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.
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.
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.