Science Quote by Dennis Ritchie

“Obviously” is doing a lot of work here: it’s Ritchie signaling that the origin story of modern computing isn’t a lone-genius fable, and that anyone who knows the real lineage should already see Ken Thompson’s fingerprints on it. The line reads modest on the surface, but it’s also a quiet corrective to how credit tends to calcify around a single name. If you’ve ever heard C and Unix discussed as “Ritchie’s creations,” this is the man himself nudging the spotlight sideways.

The context matters. Ritchie and Thompson built Unix at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, an environment unusually tolerant of experimentation but still shaped by institutional constraints and the wreckage of failed big-system ambitions. Thompson’s earlier work on operating systems (and his minimalist, tool-oriented sensibility) created the problem-space in which Ritchie’s C became not just a language, but a lever: a way to make Unix portable, replicable, and therefore culturally contagious.

There’s subtext in the phrasing, too. Ritchie doesn’t say “I owe him a lot”; he says “most influence on my career,” which frames Thompson as an intellectual catalyst rather than a benefactor. It’s a scientist’s way of describing mentorship: not sentimental, not hierarchical, but architectural. Influence here means shaping taste - what counts as an elegant solution, what to ignore, what to build next. The quote’s real intent is to tell you that the breakthroughs we mythologize are usually partnerships with asymmetric visibility, and that the most honest innovators are often the first to admit it.