They could make an entire movie out of AT&T trying to hire Ken Thompson, and it would be called _Searching for Ken Thompson._

The faces of people that started time. Unix timestamp that is.

These guys are legends. And so humble. Talk about an influencer. This is an influencer!

"Am I wasting too much time." Are you kidding? This is like the sermon on the mount. Take all the time you would like.

This is the most interesting 1 hour on KZfaq I've had in years. Ken Thomposon is a fantastic storyteller!

Step one: turn projector off Step two: shut down the notebook Step three: take out paper notes

Ken: One Week; One Week; One Week; and we had Unix.. Brian: I think programmers are not much productive these days.. Such gods speaking before mere mortals. Legendary.

They should've let him talk all day. Amazing guys.

"i was 3 weeks away from creating a new OS", I have been learning how to open files for a year.

"And at some point, I realize without knowing it up until that point that I was three weeks from an operating system with 3 programs : one a week. An editor, I needed an editor to write code. I need an assembler to turn the code into language I could run. And I needed a little kernel kind of overlay call it an operating system. And luckily right at that moment my wife went on a three-week vacation" Ken Thompson

Man, its full of goosebumps ... to get to know about how things were born! I mean, the real things like Unix, C, grep, pipes, etc... Very inspiring to see legends sharing the same stage! Missing Dennis Ritchie though!

I love how casually Ken Thompson just says he created an editor, an assembler & a kernel in under 3weeks for the UNIX operating system while his wife & child were away on holiday & @ 37:10, he hacked away and created the GREP program overnight, to present it to his boss the next day at work since he needed such a robust SEARCH tool, as if it’s not one of the most well known and most used command line tools even till date in 2021. That amount of humility and candor shown here by him, is astonishing. Meanwhile tiny KZfaqrs that’ve just gotten into Google & Amazon and worked there as SWEs for a few years, will now come on here and be making it seem like they just dropped down from heaven and are above and beyond everyone else in the Tech Space.

"One week, one week, one week and we had Unix." Damn, I need to speed up work on my software project! :D

7:55 Getting started 11:00 Bell Labs: In Pursuit of Ken Thompson 17:11 Multics OS 21:13 Invention of Unix 23:40 "Funding Unix", Dennis Ritchie kicks in 29:27 The PDP-11 30:30 Pipes 35:07 Grep command 38:35 Language B 52:53 Moscow Trip Story

"I was a pretty good programmer"

I am a native Greek speaker. The first line on his T-shirt says: "I finally understood it!"

I love how they got Brian Kernighan to interview him, everything was a perfect set up for Ken to knock out of the park, great interview!

Future nerds are gonna be sooo jealous we saw him while he was still a living legend! Just a regular Joe that happened to do great things. Thrilled that he still loves to tell the stories. I get the feeling he's still slightly perplexed why we put him on such a pedestal for just doing what he can't help doing 😊 This sit-down is _solid gold_ ✨

For being 77, Ken looks and sounds great. =)

These guys are rock stars of computer science and yet they are so humble. I would love to see more interviews with both of them

as someone who's made their living with Unix since 1989 and taught Unix at NYU for years .. LOVE THIS!

Mr. Ken Thompson's t-shirt: "ΕΠΙΤΕΛΟΥΣ ΤΟ ΚΑΤΑΛΑΒΑ!", meaning, "Finally, I get it!" or "Finally, I understand it!", and with this beard he looks like Archimedes! Usually, the computer geeks are people with no sense of humor, but in this case, this guy has a plenty of it! Anyway, a true genius, humble and funny guy.

three gods of Computer Science Dennis,Ken and Brian

Ken Thompson is by far the ultimate geek.

Someone should make a movie out of this unix legend.

This video is a gem. I hope it never gets taken down or made private. It is something every developer should watch just so they know what it means to be a developer

These guys are so humble that they completely avoid being in the trap of success paradox.

23:11 "And luckily right at that moment my wife went on a 3 weeks vacation to take my one year old (roughly) to visit my in-laws who were in California, this period long, 1 week, 1 week, 1 week... and we had Unix"

These guy truly a father of modern computer technology, in their own right command respect and perseverence, sadly Denis passed away, seeing these duo very satisfying.

Hail and respect to our great masters and lords. They contributed over than 50 years of continuous and generous work for humanity: MULTICS, BCPL, UNIX, C, PLAN9, AWK, GO. How UNIX changed humanity can be compared to how Newton's classical mechanics changed the world or to how Alexander's Fleming Penicillin changed the history of biology and medical treatment.

It occurred to me watching this that there Ken seems to be cut from the same cloth as Steve Wozniak. Both men unambitious and seem to have a 'hippy' attitude, but extremely successful because they love what they do!

Thank you so very much for recording this interview in such high quality and for sharing it with us. I love hearing about Unix history and I have desperately been wanting to watch a proper interview with Ken Thompson. And to have this one given by his friend and colleague Brian Kernighan, in a comfortable setting surrounded by fellow geeks, was absolute magic. I could have listened to hours more. The story about Doug McIlroy made my jaw drop. Such fascinating gentlemen and such unparalleled intelligence. Really enjoyed it!

Ken Thompson is a national treasure

Besides UNIX itself, pipes are probably the greatest general invention that came out of the UNIX development. The whole talk is amazing.

I really wanted Dennis to live longer, so I could watch him somewhere like this. Alas, we rarely get what we want.

08:20 is when the interview start

This is gold! I wish they had made the interview when Dennis Ritchie was still alive. Thanks so much for uploading it.

I teach operating systems. My students have issues in closing their jaw when I reveal that some marketing person they worship did not know what program is. Yet they don't know who Dennis, Ken and Brian are. As a start , I subministered them this video. A healthy mixture of humbleness, competence and honesty. I hope this spirit will come back someday.

Ken seems to be full of stories and I love it. Hoping to hear more of them.

I remember at 19 seeing pipes and thinking it was brilliant. Probably used them almost weekly in the last 30 years, searching and reformatting output.

It is really inspiring to sit at the feet of these grand elders and be bathed in their experience. Its like being in a dream. Ritchie, Thompson, Kernighan.... are the World's apex of computer programming.

Oral history interviews like this one are pure gold. Thanks for preserving history for us!

Living history. Men behind all our phones, tablets, all our moden Life. A true wizzard of the time. Hats off.

insane achievement. that level of productivity is only attained when you're attuned to the subject at a soul level.

Great interview, thanks for arranging it, recording, and posting.

34:24: "You type one two + and it would say 'four'. [..] I was never good at math" Honestly this is kinda nice to hear, you can be hugely successful and make gigantic contributions to computer science without being that good at math. I've felt for a long time, that logic is much more important in many CS areas.

Thank you for recording this.

Thank you for putting this out. So good.

Thanks for sharing and posting this, loved it

Wish this was 10 more hours.

Beautiful! Thank you for uploading this video!

Thanks for posting!

Wow, this is great! I'd never heard of this conference before but I have now!

Two legends. Thank you VCF for preserving this.

I could have listened to this interview for hours.

Great talk! Two of my favorite people.

This is my favorite interview on KZfaq so far.

Holy crap a Ken interview, I've been waiting so long

Amazing! Loved every second.

So much love and respect for these men!

Thank you very much for the video. I am grateful for being able to listen to these guys.

This interview is amazing! These guys are absolute legends in the computing world.

One of the best interview

I was amazing watching legends like them talk about their past. Thank you very much for sharing the video with us.

Fantastic storyteller and an absolute legend. Thanks. This was a great watch. Best wishes

I can listen to both of them like... forever.

I like every single moment of this interview - Ken Thompson is so inspiring!

Very enjoyable video with historical significance. Thanks for sharing.

I could listen to these men all week

I could listen to Ken talk for hours

"Grep moved from my directory to the bin" thats like genesis " God said let there be light ... and there was light " lol

Always a great storyteller. It's been decades since I've seen him, and Dennis, and Lorne... Great memories!

i'm too obsessed with the history of unix, getting excited/frustrated when little things are skipped over. The name for grep comes from the ed commands, g/re/p (global / regular expression search / and print). So great relaxing to Ken Thompson and bwk talk about this history, could sit and listen for hours

What an amazing 1 hour spent in the company of one of the brightest minds of the Computer industry: Ken T. , the creator of the UNIX with his loooong-time collaborator, Brian K.

This is so good!! Thanks

Amazing to see and hear these legends together again.

Three years later and it still holds up!

this is what internet is for... what legends you had here.. thanks for sharing

I loved every minute of it

Considering how hugely influential they've been, it is amazing to see how down to earth and humble they are.

We need more Ken Thompson

Thank you for this piece of history of computing. I'm so glad the foundations of what we use today were laid out by these brilliant minds striving for elegance and simplicity.

Fantastic interview, those guys at Bell Labs are geniuses.

Thank you, LW! This is phenomenal! ☺🐯

I could've listened for longer, great conversation!

I could sit and listen for hours!

Truly incredible. Thank you very much for uploading this video.

This was fantastic, and brought back a lot of memories from the 1970s. Thanks so much for posting this.

kind of a shame that the talk couldn't go longer. I very much enjoyed it though and I hope that Ken Thompson can come back at a later festival.

Wonderful people. Hope in my life, I will be able to contribute to the community as they did.

LOVE the story of “Belle” the chess playing computer.

Wow I could listen to their stories for ever! Such interesting stuff happened that we've never heard about haha.

Wow. The memories. Didnt know this was here.

Thank you for sharing! I really enjoyed it 💕💕

I saw this in person. It was standing room only by the time I got there. I remember Ken at one point saying 34:35 "I was never good at math." I'd been going to VCF East for a few years at this point, I'm sad I missed it in 2020. One guy at VCF East has an Altair 8800 and AM radio that plays Daisy picking up the CPU cycles.

No word, just good to see these two legends stay healthy

The greatest people are the humbler ones

Amazing...I could listen to Ken's stories all day long!

Sat in Ken's office at Google one Sunday when I started at Apple under Jobs. It was a fun visit. Been doing Unix since v6 and receiving Ken's tapes at Stanford Research Institute for my machines plus all the chess tests we did on the phone for Belle. Also got a nice kudo from dmr regarding a C program I wrote. A fond memory. The above interview is worthy. Also chatted with Brian about his recent book on Golang.... never chatted with Doug M. Pipes are my favorite feature to this day. I was lucky because I had access to all the OS and apps source code of v6. Spent a lot of time pouring through that code. Cool interview VCF!!!

We need a Bell Labs movie. So much came out of there that withstood the test of time and take it for granted today.