Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment: Second Edition

Foreword

At some point during nearly every interview I give, as well as in question periods after talks, I get asked some variant of the same question: “Did you expect Unix to last for so long?” And of course the answer is always the same: No, we didn’t quite anticipate what has happened. Even the observation that the system, in some form, has been around for well more than half the lifetime of the commercial computing industry is now dated.

The course of developments has been turbulent and complicated. Computer technology has changed greatly since the early 1970s, most notably in universal networking, ubiquitous graphics, and readily available personal computing, but the system has somehow managed to accommodate all of these phenomena. The commercial ...