The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.

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

Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it

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.