Quotes from Ken Thompson

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

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

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

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

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

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.

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

When in doubt, use brute force.

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

The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.

I am a programmer.

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

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

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

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

I am a very bottom-up thinker.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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