Ken Thompson

“In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.”

“I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.”

“I am a very bottom-up thinker.”

“When in doubt, use brute force.”

“Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.”

“There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.”

“I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems.”

“I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.”

“A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.”

“There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.”

“We have persistant objects, they're called files.”

“So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners' World addict again.”

“The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.”

“It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.”

“I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.”

“I am a programmer.”

“That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.”

“No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.”

“The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.”

“In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.”