Peter H. Salus

Peter H. Salus is a linguist, computer scientist, historian of technology, author in many fields, and an editor of books and journals. He has conducted research in germanistics, language acquisition, and computer languages. He has a 1963 PhD in Linguistics from New York University.

After an intense academic career serving as professor and dean at several universities, he is now largely retired. He has also been Executive Director of both the USENIX Association and the Sun User Group, and Vice President of the Free Software Foundation; in addition, he has worked for several high tech startups. From 1987 to 1996, he was Managing Editor of the technical journal Computing Systems (MIT Press and the USENIX Association).

He is best known for his books on the history of computing, particularly A Quarter Century of UNIX and Casting The Net (a history of the Internet up to 1995).

Partial bibliography

• Völuspá : The Song of the Sybil (translated by Paul B. Taylor and W. H. Auden, Icelandic text edited by Peter H. Salus and Paul B. Taylor, 1968)
• On Language Plato to Humboldt (Holt, Reinholt, and Winston, Inc., 1969)
• For W. H. Auden, February 21, 1972 (ed. Peter H. Salus and Paul B. Taylor, 1972)
• A Quarter Century of UNIX (Addison Wesley, June 1, 1994; ISBN 0-201-54777-5)
• Casting the Net (Addison-Wesley, March 1995; ISBN 0-201-87674-4)
• Packet Communication (Robert Metcalfe, David Walden, Peter H. Salus; Annabooks/Rtc Books, 1996; ISBN 1-57398-033-1)
• Handbook of Programming Languages (ed.; Indianapolis, IN: Macmillan Technical Pub., 1998; four volumes: ISBN 1-57870-008-6, ISBN 1-57870-009-4, ISBN 1-57870-010-8, ISBN 1-57870-011-6)
• Big Book of IPv6 Addressing RFCs (Morgan Kaufmann, 2000; ISBN 0-12-616770-2)
• The Daemon, the Gnu & the Penguin (Reed Media Services, Sept. 2008; ISBN 978-0-9790342-3-7) — previously serialised on the Groklaw website