Ken Thompson

1943– · American programmer and computer scientist, co-creator of the Unix operating sys

Topics: unix, software design, programming, security

• The press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.

  — Ken Thompson

• We have persistent objects, they're called files.

  — Ken Thompson

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

  — Ken Thompson

• I must say the Linux community is a lot nicer than the Unix community. A negative comment on Unix would warrant death threats. With Linux, it is like stirring up a nest of butterflies.

  — Ken Thompson

• In Plan 9, the key abstraction is the file system—anything you can read and write and select by names in a hierarchy—and the protocol exports that abstraction to remote channels to enable distribution.

  — Ken Thompson

• 'Gigabit' seems to mean 600 megabits. It's a VAX gigabit.

  — Ken Thompson

• Unix was small, and you could go through it line by line and understand exactly how it worked. That was the origin of the so-called Unix culture.

  — Ken Thompson

• It does everything Unix does only less reliably.

  — Ken Thompson

• You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.

  — Ken Thompson

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

  — Ken Thompson

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

  — Ken Thompson