Unix historian Peter Salus dies at 86

Peter Salus, the linguist-turned-computing-historian whose 1994 book A Quarter Century of Unix remains a foundational text on the operating system’s origins, died on May 15. The news was shared on the TUHS (The Unix Heritage Society) mailing list by Dan C., who called the book required reading for serious students of Unix history.

Salus chronicled the people and decisions behind Unix, BSD, and the early open-source movement at a time when much of that history existed only as oral tradition among its participants. His passing comes alongside another loss noted in the same thread: Peter Neumann, the longtime moderator of the RISKS Digest.