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UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
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.
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done.
I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.
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.
To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.
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.
The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It's pretty shocking to me.
C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new.
![DilbertNickel.gif]Condescending Unix User](https://cdn.quotesgram.com/img/22/25/1101746353-DilbertNickel.gif)
