Ah, “progress” or a budget finally caught up to the UNIX guys. If these guys hadn’t written UNIX, and the Berkeley guys hadn’t hacked it all up, where would we be today? I have been quite fortunate in that I got a chance to talk to Dennis Ritchie at length a few years ago, in what basically amounted to a chance encounter when I offered to get him a beer at a USENIX evening event. I didn’t even know who he was, just that he needed a drink (the beer was free, I wasn’t being real noble). He mentioned something to me, though, which sticks out in my mind. He said that he was at the right place at the right time, and that any one of us would have done the same thing if we’d been there.
Would we have?