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.

My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.

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

Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.

When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.

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

UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity.