from Programming Paradigms
by Michael Swaine in Nov. 1997 Dr. Dobbs. Journal

I have been reading a pretty good book on the history of UNIX, Usenet
and the Internet. It's called `Netizens', and it's by Michael and 
Ronda Hauben (IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997, ISBN 0-81850-7706-6).

  One of the things I like about it is the coious quotations from the 
actual participants in the developments it discusses.

  For example, I learned what I take to be the true story of the 
invention of the UNIX comman grep, inthe words of Doug McIlroy,
for whom grep was written by Ken Thompson. I've heard several
versions of what grep stands for, but according to McIlroy, Thompson
was just collapsing the editor commands it simulated: g/re/p, or "global,
regular expression, print." It was McIlroy, incidently, who pushed for
the idea of pipes in UNIX, which one learns a couple of pages earlier.

  There are many histories of the Net, from the memoirs of participants
to dry academic reports to popularized accounts for mass consumption. The
Haubens have produced a readable but well-documented story of the 
development of the Internet.

  They spent years working on the book, and really seem to have done their
research.

  Java book publishers ought to emulate them.