"Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson"
About this Quote
Dennis Ritchie is acknowledging a partnership that defined modern computing. Ken Thompson was not only a collaborator at Bell Labs but a shaping force in how Ritchie thought about systems, code, and elegance. After the ambitious Multics project collapsed, Thompson hacked together a small, fast time-sharing system on a PDP-7 in 1969. That kernel of an idea became Unix, and Ritchie joined to expand and refine it. Thompson brought a taste for directness and simplicity: build the minimal thing that works, then iteratively improve it. Ritchie absorbed that ethos and gave it durable form, especially through the design of the C programming language.
Thompson had created the B language, itself descended from BCPL, and his practical needs informed Ritchies creation of C. When they rewrote Unix in C for the PDP-11 in 1973, they demonstrated a revolutionary idea: an operating system written in a high-level language, portable across machines. That step multiplied the reach of their work and cemented a philosophy built on composability, clear interfaces, and tools that do one thing well. Thompson set the pace with bold, stripped-down designs and fast prototypes; Ritchie delivered the intellectual clarity and language machinery that made those designs stable and widely teachable.
The acknowledgment also reflects Bell Labs culture, where ideas flowed freely among peers such as Doug McIlroy and Brian Kernighan, but Thompson stood as Ritchies closest influence. Their joint Turing Award in 1983 underscored how entwined their contributions were. The lineage is everywhere today: Unix ideals underpin Linux, BSD, and macOS; the C language fathered generations of systems code and influenced C++, Objective-C, and even the shapes of Java and Go.
To say that Thompson had the most influence is to recognize how a single colleagues taste and habits can permeate a field. The calm austerity of Unix and the lean power of C bear Thompsons imprint as surely as Ritchies, and Ritchies humility in crediting that influence is itself part of the story of how great engineering gets done.
Thompson had created the B language, itself descended from BCPL, and his practical needs informed Ritchies creation of C. When they rewrote Unix in C for the PDP-11 in 1973, they demonstrated a revolutionary idea: an operating system written in a high-level language, portable across machines. That step multiplied the reach of their work and cemented a philosophy built on composability, clear interfaces, and tools that do one thing well. Thompson set the pace with bold, stripped-down designs and fast prototypes; Ritchie delivered the intellectual clarity and language machinery that made those designs stable and widely teachable.
The acknowledgment also reflects Bell Labs culture, where ideas flowed freely among peers such as Doug McIlroy and Brian Kernighan, but Thompson stood as Ritchies closest influence. Their joint Turing Award in 1983 underscored how entwined their contributions were. The lineage is everywhere today: Unix ideals underpin Linux, BSD, and macOS; the C language fathered generations of systems code and influenced C++, Objective-C, and even the shapes of Java and Go.
To say that Thompson had the most influence is to recognize how a single colleagues taste and habits can permeate a field. The calm austerity of Unix and the lean power of C bear Thompsons imprint as surely as Ritchies, and Ritchies humility in crediting that influence is itself part of the story of how great engineering gets done.
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