For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

A software system is transparent when you can look at it and immediately see what is going on. It is simple when what is going on is uncomplicated enough for a human brain to reason about all the potential cases without strain

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.

The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction.

Free markets select for winning solutions.