Dennis Ritchie Quotes

Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.

The definition of an 'operating system' is bound to evolve with customer demands and technological possibilities.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing.

This is the system that we have. I didn’t make the system. This is the system that we have.

Software comes from heaven when you have good hardware.

There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.

I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.

I was surprised about vi going in, though, I didn't know it was in System V.

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.

And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux.

There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.

Every time I can find another engineer to add to the Chrome OS platform, I'm going to hire him.

If you've got good systemising skills you can apply them to systems you aren't familiar with, and look for patterns.

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

Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself - and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure.

Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad.

Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.

The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father's study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.

Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

This Windows 95 hairball has become so big, so unmanageable, so hard to use, so hard to configure, so hard to keep up and running, so hard to keep secure. Windows 95 is a great gift to give your kid this Christmas because it will keep your kid fascinated for months trying to get it up and running and trying to figure out how to use it.

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.