Ken Thompson

“Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress.”

“One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.”

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

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

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

“It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.”

“I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.”

“One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can't.”

“You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.”

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

“I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.”

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

“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.”

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

“On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.”

“I am a programmer.”

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

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

“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.”