File System Quotes

At MIT, mostly what I did was documentation. I sort of read things. Wrote some descriptions of various aspects of the file system. Did not really do very much programming at all. At least on Multics.

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.

I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.

Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.

Cosmoe works on any of the standard filesystems available for Linux.

We have persistant objects, they're called files.

I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.

With computer science, I had to go through that uncomfortable process of my brain establishing a hash table, if you will - the coders will get that - for this new information, because I didn't have one. So I had to establish a brand-new file system from scratch.

Besides, REAL computers have a rename system call.

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.