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.

For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.

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

C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.