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That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.
Ken Thompson -
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
Ken Thompson
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I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.
Ken Thompson -
I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.
Ken Thompson -
There's going to be no serious problem after this.
Ken Thompson -
Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.
Ken Thompson -
I do believe that in a race, it is naive to think Linux has a hope of making a dent against Microsoft starting from way behind with a fraction of the resources and amateur labor. (I feel the same about Unix.)
Ken Thompson -
The press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. ... There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked.
Ken Thompson
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No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
Ken Thompson -
We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn't have records.
Ken Thompson -
I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.
Ken Thompson -
If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.
Ken Thompson -
I am a very bottom-up thinker.
Ken Thompson -
I must say the Linux community is a lot nicer than the Unix community. A negative comment on Unix would warrant death threats. With Linux, it is like stirring up a nest of butterflies.
Ken Thompson
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One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can't.
Ken Thompson -
There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.
Ken Thompson -
I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems.
Ken Thompson -
Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: 'I'd spell creat with an e.'
Ken Thompson