Dennis Ritchie's Home Page

December 17, 2000 7:42 PM

Dennis Ritchie's Home Page (If you have to ask who he is...)
posted by Steven Den Beste (4 comments total)

My house is about two miles from the enormous Bell Labs campus, and I've spent a great deal of time skateboarding there and running from security. I've seen Dennis Ritchie walking around a couple of times, and even talked to him once. He was kind and even expressed interest in my skateboarding (the physics of the ollie mostly). I told him that I was setting up Linux on one of my home machines and he smiled. Honestly, I wasn't sure what to say... at the time I was just starting a class in C, and anything I could say about the language seemed trite, oh well.
posted by steve.wdc at 8:21 PM on December 17, 2000

I suppose this is off topic but I thought it was
way cool. Ritchie's home page has a pointer
to people doing UNIX preservation. They've got sources
to early version of UNIX and PDP emulators to run them
on. I can't think any real world use for this but
the nostalgia value (for me) is high.
posted by rdr at 12:26 AM on December 18, 2000

I used to work at Bell Labs when I was in high school. After picking up bits of UNIX, I discovered that I could remotely log someone out by finding which tty they were using and just doing a stty 0 > /dev/ttyn. The first time I tried this, I chose Dennis' tty. I don't think he ever knew it was me.
posted by plinth at 6:52 AM on December 18, 2000

If that link is mf-worthy, then this one certainly is as well.
posted by milnak at 11:26 PM on December 20, 2000