Dennis Ritchie

The tradeoff was that without the students, you could do more of your own thing and you were doing it with your peers.

So, you know, I would argue with somebody, Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie or whatever like that, who were my peers.

I didn't have to work with students.

But of course, the flip side is that I didn't get any of the benefit that you'd get with bright, young, new people talking about it.

How did you know your group was so special? Because when I look at it, it is in hindsight.

I mean, I saw Bjorn was reporting to you.

And of course, there's Dennis Ritchie nearby and Ken Thompson.

You also mentioned other people like McElroy and Hamming.

Um, Kernighan.

No, Dennis Ritchie, I'm sorry.

And, uh-

So what are you using to link your images on BSD?

They were nerds with money who mostly just wanted to be left to their projects, and it made sense that they were in charge of our digital experience.

We have strayed pretty far from that." Yeah, and if you'll permit me interjecting here again, I, I would put, you know, the early BSD people, people like Dennis Ritchie and a lot of the, the technical names, um, people who built the projects and software that we use now, um, were...

My impression of them, um, I, I was extraordinarily lucky to have met Gordon Bell a few times, and apparently he was quite the firebrand to work for, but he w- also had that kind of ob- obsessive, uh, uh, attention to detail.

But, um, was just...

So now here's a narrow background.

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and a bunch of other guys sitting in AT&T Bell Labs research have come out of this environment where there was an attempt to do a similar thing for the operating system, Multics, which was this sprawling project to let's build the best interactive operating system we can.

And they brought every vendor in the planet into the room.

And the whole thing exploded into a specification mess of 123 different options.

Richie.

Dennis Richie.

Kerrigan and Richie.

Yeah.