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

I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate

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

From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.

A program designed for inputs from people is usually stressed beyond breaking point by computer-generated inputs.

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX.

Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.