The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.

With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.

Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.

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.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world