A biography for Ken Thompsonhasn’t been written yet.
“Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.”
“When in doubt, use brute force.”
“There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.”
“In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.”
“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.”
“If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.”
“There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.”
“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.”
“No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.”
“We have persistant objects, they're called files.”
“A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.”