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

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.
Ken Thompson

I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.
Ken Thompson

I am a programmer.
Ken Thompson

I am a very bottom-up thinker.
Ken Thompson

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.
Ken Thompson

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.
Ken Thompson

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

I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.
Ken Thompson

I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems.
Ken Thompson


I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.
Ken Thompson

If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.
Ken Thompson

In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.
Ken Thompson

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

It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.
Ken Thompson

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

No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
Ken Thompson

On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.
Ken Thompson

One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can't.
Ken Thompson

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.
Ken Thompson