Linux and the Unix Philosophy

The Unix developers certainly didn’t know what would happen to Unix.

Nor did the developers of MS-DOS, OpenVMS, and every other operating

system for that matter. Every new OS—and Linux is no exception—takes its

designers into uncharted waters. Their only hope consists of continually

gathering progress reports and then correcting the course accordingly.

For example, did Ken Thompson realize the importance of portability

when he wrote the first Unix kernel? Evidently not, for he wrote early Unix

kernels in assembly language. He rewrote them later in a higher-level lan

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guage, altering his original direction. Did Dennis Ritchie anticipate that C

would