Peter Salus has died

Buildstarted•1 day ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_H._Salus

armada1122•1 day ago

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.

oldspleen•1 day ago

During college, his Unix history book was the first one I read that actually made the AT&T => BSD => linux throughline make sense. RIP.

angry_octet•1 day ago

https://www.fsf.net/~adam/qcu.pdf

Tepix•1 day ago

We should honor these people when they turn 80, then they get to see all the love and respect themselves!

Tade0•1 day ago

Let's make it 70 - otherwise even if the tradition started 15 years ago, Dennis Ritchie wouldn't be included.

zvr•1 day ago

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.

YesThatTom2•1 day ago

He was also executive director of both the USENIX Association in its very early years.

TZubiri•1 day ago

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.

massimosgrelli•1 day ago

Thanks for sharing this link. I'll read it right away. If you are passionate about Unix history, you should also get Unix: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...

Projectiboga•1 day ago

anna's archive has it in a 20MB Pdf. you can find a link for that archive on the Wikipedia for the Anna's archive.

TZubiri•about 12 hours ago

No thank you. I recommend not downloading stuff from a website that cannot hold a Domain for longer than a year and forces you to learn what the 'real domain' is and asks you not to fall for any imposters.

If not for legal reasons, then for security reasons.

The Internet Archive doesn't have to evade law enforcement and doesn't ask you to put your systems at risk.

farwaabbas•1 day ago

RIP a legend. Thanks for preserving Unix history.

krylon•1 day ago

Rest in peace, Mister Salus.

Abh1Works•1 day ago

RIP a goat

Peter Salus has died

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