Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.

Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf know, instinctively, that property is no mere social convention or game, but a critically important evolved mechanism for the avoidance of violence. (This makes them smarter than a good many human political theorists.)

The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.

In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.

Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.