He has also been executive director of both the USENIX Association and the Sun User Group, and Vice President of the Free Software Foundation.[8] He was one of the organizers of the 1996 conference on Freely Redistributable Software in Cambridge.[9] 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).
Contributions
In 1966, Salus worked with W. H. Auden on a translation of the Poetic Edda. During his work he discovered that the "Airman's Alphabet" in Auden's work was derived from the Eddic poems or more likely the translation by Bruce Dickins.[10] In December 1965 Salus attended a meeting of the Tolkien Society in New York.[11] Auden and Salus' comments and intentions to write a book on J. R. R. Tolkien were reported by The New Yorker and The Daily Telegraph. However, Tolkien disapproved of a book on himself and was critical of Auden's reported remarks on his house and Salus' observations on the shape of Middle-earth.[12]
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).
Peter Salus at the 1,000,000,000-second UNIX time event, in Copenhagen on 9 September 2001
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 von Humboldt (Holt, Reinholt, and Winston, Inc., 1969)[13]
