On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 12:16 AM Eric Allman wrote: > On 2019-09-14 17:58, Adam Thornton wrote: > > I...have never been all that impressed with Salus's work. It's not > _bad_ but it's also not terribly insightful. > I think Peter's work was an amazing effort to collect and disseminate > facts, and despite a few gaps (inevitable) he did a great job. But > Peter's works were more collections of facts than attempts to interpret, > contextualize, or otherwise put the facts into a larger narrative. +1 Amen, bro. For many of us that lived the time he covered, which was the first 25 years, it's awesome and frankly, I don't look for it for insights, as that was to me not what he was after doing. He was trying to create a narrative that documented what happened. Yes, he left things out, but pretty much go it right. > Honest historians can disagree on the role of written histories. A pure > "just the facts ma'am" history avoids context and interpretation but > tends to be fairly dry. This was Peter's approach. I agree. Moreover, as Jon points out, I'm not sure even if was made widely available, other than people like those on this list, I'm not sure it will be really that interesting. > But it's impossible to completely avoid bias because you have to pick and choose the facts you include. And this is the biggest issue. And I have observed (maybe I'm wrong - but it seems to me ...) that the people that I know today, that dislike Peter's work dislike that Linux is not huge part of it. Or more importantly that it was the emergence of the *Internet and UNIX that were enablers for Linux*. As Jon has suggested, it should not be Gnu/Linux but rather Internet/Linux. Contextualizing history inevitably leads to interpretation > which leads to some amount of bias, but interesting or even gripping > histories read like a novel that unfolds before you. *i.e.* Peter is not David McCullough and we don't seem to have David coming to us to write his next book. I've believed for a long time that when the definitive history of Unix > is written, Peter's books will be a major (albeit not "primary", in the > technical sense) source material. Absolutely. It needs to be the place where a historian starts. I salute him for all his hard (and early) work. I hope that someone will > step up to do this larger history (much of which happened after Peter's > publication dates) before we all die off. +1 A louder *amen*.... > And I have to say, It looks like Warner's research (with all the > abundant help from this group) the last week or two is amazing. I agree - as much as I offered some additions and corrections it is well done -- thank you, Warner. > .... I deeply regret that I never had an opportunity to meet Joe Ossanna. Indeed.