A Quarter Century of Unix

Author: Peter Salus
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; June 10, 1994
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0201547775
ISBN-13: 978-0201547771

The book itself says:

On June 12, 1972, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie wrote, “the number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.” Two years later the number was 50. It is estimated that there are over 3 million UNIX systems in operation today …

UNIX is a software system that is simple, elegant, portable, and powerful. It grew in popularity without the benefit of a large marketing organization. Programmers kept using it; big companies kept fighting it. After a decade, it was clear that the users had won. A Quarter Century of UNIX is the first book to explain this incredible success, using the words of its creators, developers, and users to illustrate how the sociology of a technical group can overwhelm the intent of multi-billion-dollar corporations. In preparing to write this book, Peter Salus interviewed over 100 of these key figures and gathered relevant information from Australia to Austria. This is the book that turns UNIX folklore into UNIX history.

The book provides the first documented history of the development of the UNIX operating system, includes interviews with over 100 key figures in the UNIX community, contains classic photos and illustrations, and explains why UNIX succeeded.

Peter Salus has very graciously granted “TUHS the right to reproduce and distribute [a scanned version of the book], retaining
the © 1994 information” (private e-mail to Warren Toomey, January 2015). The link to the PDF file is here. However, if you can, please also purchase a paper copy of the book so that Peter is still remunerated for all his hard work. Note that Peter and Addison-Wesley retain the copyrights to the work.