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.

The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.

I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.

I listen to mostly-classical music, but mostly by radio - I'm not an audiophile.

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

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

Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.