68 Quotes by Dennis Ritchie

One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.

The visible things that have come from the group have been the Plan 9 system and Inferno, but I hasten to say that the ideas and the work have come from colleagues.

Oh, I've seen copies [of Linux Journal] around the terminal room at The Labs.

Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.

The notion of a record is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card.

I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax...

Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.

It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.