Ken Thompson Quotes

I don`t think there are many people up in research who have strong ideas about things that they haven`t really had experience with.

A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.

I am a very bottom-up thinker.

We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn`t have records.

I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.

I also enjoy writing my regular column for Organic Gardening magazine, so I may do more of that sort of thing in the future, if anybody wants it!

There`s a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.

I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you`d put a column thing in there.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.

So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners` World addict again.

More precisely stated, the problem is to write a source program that, when compiled and executed, will produce as output an exact copy of its source.

In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.

No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.

I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it`s coupled with file systems.

Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress.

If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.

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.

I am a programmer.

There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.

The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.

One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can`t.

Outside of operating systems in general tend to operate on programs and they have to somehow turn the notion of data and programs inside out.

That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.

My background for obtaining these ideas was uh, there was a I went to the school at Berkeley and there was a thing called Project Genie at Berkeley.

We have persistant objects, they`re called files.

For most of that time, I`ve also been a keen gardener, but for many years I failed to make the connection between gardening and science.

You can`t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.

It`s always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.

In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.

It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.

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.

The X server has to be the biggest program I`ve ever seen that doesn`t do anything for you.

When in doubt, use brute force.

On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.