Peter H. Salus is a linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, computer scientist

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

, historian of technology

History of science and technology

The history of science and technology is a field of history which examines how humanity's understanding of the natural world and ability to manipulate it have changed over the centuries...

, author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 in many fields, and an editor of books and journals. He has conducted research in germanistics, language acquisition

Language acquisition

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...

, and computer languages. He has a 1963 PhD in Linguistics from New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

.

After an intense academic career serving as professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 and dean

Dean (education)

In academic administration, a dean is a person with significant authority over a specific academic unit, or over a specific area of concern, or both...

 at several universities, he is now largely retired. He has also been Executive Director of both the USENIX

USENIX

-External links:* *...

 Association and the Sun User Group, and Vice President of the Free Software Foundation

Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...

; 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

MIT Press

The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...

 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
  Groklaw
  Groklaw is an award-winning website covering legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003 by paralegal Pamela Jones at Radio UserLand, it has covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU anti-trust case against Microsoft, and...
  
   website