Top 31 Quotes by Ken Thompson

There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.

So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners' World addict again.

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

I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.

In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.

The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.

I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.

A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.

It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.

We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn't have records.