I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.

C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.

It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.

One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.

It's true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate.

Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.