The Linux philosophy is to laugh in the face of danger. Oops. Wrong one. Do it yourself. That's it. (Linus Torvalds)

Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix. (Kieran O'Shaughnessy)

The two main design principles of the NeXT machine appear to be revenge and spite. (Don Lancaster)

Operating systems are like underwear — nobody really wants to look at them. (Bill Joy)

I've noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS. (Larry DeLuca)

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done. (Scott Adams)

If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that. (Marcus J Ranum)

Develop for it? I’ll piss on it. [the NeXT Computer] (Bill Gates)

Unix has been feverishly evolving for over 20 years, sort of like bacteria in a cesspool, only less attractive. (John Levine)

And on the monitor, these words appear: My name is VAXymandius, thing of pings. Look on my logic, ye coders, and despair! (Dave Weingart)

Every mistake in the computer industry gets made at least 3 times: once by mainframe folks, once by minicomputer folks, and at least once by microprocessor folks. (John Mashey)

Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses. (Richard P Gabriel)

Now that we have all this useful information, it would be nice to be able to do something with it. (Actually, it can be emotionally fulfilling just to get information. This is usually only true, however, if you have the social life of a kumquat.) (UNIX Programmer's Manual)

The Windows API has done more to retard skill development than anything since COBOL maintenance. (Larry O'Brien)

The purpose of the icons, the purpose of the entire OS X look and feel, is to keep the customer happy during that critical period between the time of sale and the time the check clears. (Bruce Tognazini)

In 1971 when I joined the staff of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, all of us who helped develop the operating system software, we called ourselves hackers. (Richard Stallman)

AI has been brain-dead since the 1970s. (Marvin Minsky)

Linux is just a file system and a file manager. (Steve Ballmer)

UNIX is an operating system, OS/2 is half an operating system, Windows is a shell, and DOS is a boot partition virus. (Peter Coffin)

When you say: "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare at you blankly and say: "Hey, I got those with the system -- for free." (Linus Torvalds)

Every operating system out there is about equal. We all suck. (Brian Valentine of Microsoft)

It's not the technology, folks, it's the people. When we trace [the errors] back, it's always human error. (Bob Herbold of Microsoft)

Hoaxes use weaknesses in human behaviour to ensure they are replicated and distributed. In other words, hoaxes prey on the Human Operating System. (Stewart Kirkpatrick)

It used to be said that AIX looks like one space alien discovered Unix, and described it to another different space alien who then implemented AIX. But their universal translators were broken and they'd had to gesture a lot. (Paul Tomblin)

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. (John von Neumann)

Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of UNIX, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement. (MIT job advertisement)

As it exists, the Finder is simply a very fast file clerk with the IQ of a turnip. (Don Crabb)

OS is a truly remarkable operating system. It's possible to destroy days of work with a single misplaced space, so alertness in the programming staff is encouraged. The best way to approach the system is through a keypunch. Some people claim there is a Time Sharing system that runs on OS/370, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they were mistaken. (Ed Post)

Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac (and nobody cares about it). (Bill Joy in 1985)

In pioneer days they used oxen for heavy pulling, and when one ox couldn't budge a log, they didn't try to grow a larger ox. We shouldn't be trying for bigger computers, but for more systems of computers. (Rear Admiral Grace Hopper)

What would you rather have to plow a field — two strong oxen or 1,024 chickens? (Seymour Cray)

Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS. (Alan Kay)

Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. (Linus Torvalds)

Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance. (Richard Stallman)

Any general system law will have at least two peculiar exceptions. (Gerald Weinberg)

Anyone who has attended a USENIX conference in a fancy hotel can tell you that a sentence like "You're one of those computer people, aren't you?" is roughly equivalent to "Look, another amazingly mobile form of slime mold!" in the mouth of a hotel cocktail waitress. (Elizabeth Zwicky)

I think it would be pretty bizarre if OS/2 finds any popularity. (Bill Gates)

A UNIX signature isn't a return address, it's the ASCII equivalent of a black velvet clown painting. It's a rectangle of carets surrounding a quote from a literary giant of weeniedom like Heinlein or Dr. Who. (Chris Maeda)

Saying that XP is the most stable MS OS is like saying that asparagus is the most articulate vegetable. (Dave Barry)

While programs written for Sun machines won't run unmodified on Intel-based computers, Sun said the two packages will be completely compatible and that software companies can convert a program from one system to the other through a fairly straightforward and automated process known as recompiling. (San Jose Mercury News)

SCCS is the source-code motel -- your code checks in but it never checks out. (Ken Thompson)

Mosaic is the 1990s equivalent of forcing friends to sit through slides of your trip to Florida - painful for everyone but the host.(Steve Steinberg)

AOL is like the cockroach left after the nuclear bomb hits. They know how to survive. (Jan Horsfall)

With infrastructure goods, there can be just one. MS-DOS won over the Macintosh OS, and that was that. MS-DOS transitioned to Windows, and the dominance continued. (Don Norman)

Never ask what sort of computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him? (Tom Clancy)

It's no coincidence that the most popular PC books go by names like "Windows for Dummies". Detroit doesn't sell books like "Oldsmobiles for Idiots" or "A Foul-Up's Guide to Fords". (Patrick L Anderson)

One of the main advantages of Unix over, say, MVS, is the tremendous number of features Unix lacks. (Chris Torek)

Of course, Linus didn't sit down in a vacuum and suddenly type in the Linux source code.... He had my book.... But the code was his. The proof of this is that he messed the design up. (Andrew Tanenbaum)

Ok, I admit it. I was just a front-man for the real fathers of Linux, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. (Linus Torvalds)

Ninety percent of computer users use DOS. I'd rather tell them to do drugs. (Scott McNealy)

Unfortunately, perceptions of the Linux community are shaped by Web sites such as www.slashdot.org, where self-styled experts who have the collective IQ of an AOL CD post inflammatory propaganda. (Pankaj Chowdhry)

In 1984 mainstream users were choosing VMS over UNIX. Ten years later they are choosing Windows over UNIX. What part of that message aren't you getting? (Tom Payne)

The sad and sobering fact is, our current personal computers -- the Macintosh included -- are amazingly fragile nightmare kludges of delicate interactions that only barely work right most of the time. (Steve Gibson)

JCL is a crazed assembly language programmer's idea of what a command language should look like: verbose, tedious and error-prone. AND UPPER CASE. (Geoff Collyer)

The multiple stupidities of even the latest designs, such as Microsoft’s Windows 2000 or Apple’s OS X, show either an unjustifiable ignorance of or a near-criminal avoidance of what we do know [about existing engineering methods for designing human-computer interfaces]. (Jef Raskin)

Although the Buddhists will tell you that desire is the root of suffering, my personal experience leads me to point the finger at system administration. (Philip Greenspun)

Unix is a glorified video game. People don't do Serious Work on Unix systems: they send jokes around the world on UUCP-net and write Adventure games and research papers. (Ed Post)

UNIX is snake oil. (Ken Olsen in 1987) [Olsen says he was misquoted.]

The beauty of mechanical problems is that they are often visible to the naked and untrained eye. If white smoke is rising from a disk drive, that is probably where the problem lies (unless your disk drive has just elected the new Pope). (John Bear)

We just don't think a Linux partition on a mainframe makes a lot of sense. It's kind of like having a trailer park in the back of your estate. (Scott McNealy)

Today’s PC mistakes were made on the mainframe in 1967 and fixed by 1968. (Greg Price)

I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter. (Nicholas Petreley)

See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard, too. (Linus Torvalds)

There's a simple way to find out if an operating system has been well designed. When you get an error message, go to the help system and look up the exact words in that message to see if there was enough of a concept of an architecture that they have a consistent vocabulary to talk about what's broken. (Bill Joy)