Science & Tech Quote by Eric S. Raymond

Here, Raymond is doing more than giving Thompson and Ritchie a victory lap; he is canonizing a pivot point in computing where ambition finally met feasibility. The key phrase is "good enough" - a deliberately unromantic standard that captures how engineering revolutions usually happen: not with a visionary manifesto, but with a threshold quietly crossed. Hardware gets fast enough, compilers get trustworthy enough, and suddenly an operating system stops being a bespoke artifact welded to one machine and becomes portable, transmissible, culture-building.

The subtext is a rebuke to technological fatalism. Unix wasn't destined to spread because it was "elegant" in the abstract; it spread because C created a new contract between human intent and machine detail. Write once (mostly), run anywhere (eventually) is the seed here, and Raymond points to 1978 as the moment that seed proved it could survive outside its native soil. "Whole environment" matters too: not just a kernel stunt, but a usable ecosystem moving across architectures.

Contextually, this is also Raymond speaking as a Linux-and-open-source evangelist with an origin story to protect. Portability is the precondition for collaboration at scale; you can't build a distributed community around software that only runs on one temple machine. By framing this as early "realize[d]" insight, he credits not just technical skill but a particular kind of pragmatist imagination: seeing the near future and betting the system on it.