<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_H._Salus" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_H._Salus</a>
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.<p>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.
During college, his Unix history book was the first one I read that actually made the AT&T => BSD => linux throughline make sense. RIP.
He was also executive director of both the USENIX Association in its very early years.
RIP a legend. Thanks for preserving Unix history.
Quarter century of UNIX sounds interesting.<p>I found at least 1 copy in the Internet Archive.<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/aquartercenturyofunixpeterh.salus_201910/page/n5/mode/2up" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/aquartercenturyofunixpeterh.salu...</a><p>The cover looks redacted, as the "Sex, Drugs" from "Sex, Drugs, Unix" was removed. Hopefully the content wasn't censored as well.
Rest in peace, Mister Salus.
RIP a goat
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