Funny book, I have it in my hands (with the barf bag!). The anti-forward by Dennis Ritchie is awesome all by itself. Some of it is long obsolete. For example,

Funny book, I have it in my hands (with the barf bag!). The anti-forward by Dennis Ritchie is awesome all by itself. Some of it is long obsolete. For example, Usenet/NNTP is rarely used today. And many of the specific implementation problems they mention are long-fixed on modern systems. Some of the problems they note are still valid. Some of the challenges of dealing with filenames are absolutely still true; because filenames are sequences of bytes (NOT sequences of characters), and allow stuff like leading dash, control characters, and non-characters, you can have a lot of problems. See the stuff on page 168-171. I talked about this in https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.... and https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html https://www.dwheeler.com/essays/filenames-in-shell.html That said, there are reasons that Unix-like systems took over everything. Many of their complaints are from lack of consistency. But some loss of consistency is inevitable when you have a marketplace of many people with many ideas. Many of the other systems they remember fondly were often tightly controlled by a small number of people - they were more consistent, sure, but they were also slow to implement newer ideas. When you're running a race, the one who runs faster usually wins.