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.

Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor.

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.

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

I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax.