quarter century

Historic Print M Scribners. The last quarter century in America

Historic Print (M): Scribner's. The last quarter century in AmericaThis is a museum quality, reproduction print on premium paper with archival/UV resistant inks. The framed work is single matted (ivory), under acrylic glass, with a hanging wire.Date: [1908]Subject: Bryan, William Jennings, 1860-1925. Marriage proposals--1900-1910. Dame Democracy (Fictitious character)--1900-1910. Presidential elections--United States--1900-1910.SOURCE: Library of Congress

Quarter Century
$0.99

Iomega REV 35GB/90GB Media Disk (1pk)
$72.92
Very good product to make backups of the data of your office, I already have long time using an external unit for this type of cartridges and I have never had problems. An excellent product.

A Quarter Century of UNIX
$44.99
This isn't really a big-picture history of Unix, it's more a collection of excerpts of interviews with a bunch of people, arranged in roughly chronological order. Between each excerpt is a few paragraphs or pages that gives the context for the next excerpt. It covers the period from 1969 to 1994, although it seems like everything after 1980 is breezed through in the last part of the book. Things like the various window systems or the workstation wars of the '80s and early '90s are alluded to if they're mentioned at all.

It felt like the author was too close to his subject matter, as this book leans heavily towards people he knew personally or events he was involved with. Anything else is barely mentioned. The end result is, you have a book where the vast majority of the page count is covering the period from 1969-1980, and a really surprising number of the pages are just retellings of a similar story told over and over again:

"Professor X at University Y heard about Unix from Z, so he called up Ken Thompson personally to get ahold of a V4 tape, but then when he got the tape, his department didn't want to shell out for another minicomputer to run it on, so Professor X hacked the software so he could boot it on some old/unused/novel machine that he already had. Everyone in the CS department fell in love with Unix afterwards, and soon were using troff to write all of their papers."

Seriously, I don't know what the actual page count is, but I could swear that like half of this book is a variation on that story told over and over again for various faculty members or scientists at various universities or research facilities. And it feels like that's 90% of the book. Although I'm being harsh, I'm still giving it three stars, because the subject matter is inherently fascinating to me, and it does contain a lot of anecdotes and personal perspectives that you simply will not find anywhere else. I just wish it were more of a focused, researched history that hit the important points and dropped some of the minutiae. Instead it feels like quite a bit of minutiae that doesn't really try to identify any big picture narrative in the history of the OS. It's a short book and a quick read to begin with, so it was surprising and frustrating that the author didn't try to make it more concise and balanced given the low page count.