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 kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.

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

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

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.