Interview with Dennis Ritchie (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Interview with Dennis Ritchie (2003)

anders.unix.se

100 pointszaiste16 comments

I just saw that Dennis Ritchie has a short cut to Sam on his Windows NT desktop in 2002, while Brian Kernighan was using Sam from plan9port on Mac OS in 2015, from this screenshot https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-developer...

I thought it was interesting to point this out.

The icon being pjw's face naturally :) http://spinroot.com/pico/pjw.html

Interesting — the screenshot of Ritchie's desktop towards the bottom of the article shows output of the "dict" command with a listing of available dictionaries. The only one visible is OED 2nd edition. I had no idea OED was ever available for dictd...

He's not using unix... it's a plan 9 system, and there's no dictd in plan 9...

Dennis Ritchie explained that it is Plan 9 CPU server in drawterm.

You can find a list of dictionaries available on Plan 9 inside Bell Lab at https://github.com/0intro/plan9/blob/7524062cfa4689019a4ed6f...

Unfortunately only "pgw" and "roget" are publicly available. The rest are likely died under the onslaught of copyright.

But I have never heard of OED2 being any time available as a dictionary under any Unix, that is for the general public.

Pretty interesting, that mail utility didn't bother to wrap the words correctly. Notice

    .. BSD and o\nther ..
    .. persons i\nn ..
    .. give a\nn ..

and so on.

Yes, acme mail relies on the message body being formatted to (correctly) be less than 76 or so characters per line. Its line wrapping is crude as well

That's not `\n`. That's how acme displays long lines.

Dennis Ritchie is on this page too, http://acme.cat-v.org

> That's not `\n`. That's how acme displays long lines.

Oh, yes, sure. I just didn't know how to show the line break, so just "embedded" \n-s. I realize that there are no \n-s there.

Thank you so very much, zaiste, for sharing this marvelous piece of history! I enjoyed every bit of it.

I'm curious, if you had a do-over - what particular questions would you have asked the great Dennis Ritchie?

Interesting he’susing NT back then. Wonder if he uses WSL under Win10 nowadays. Cool stuff.

I'm almost certain he isn't

Dennis Ritchie passed away in 2011.

Didn't realize :-(

RIP Mr Ritchie.

Rejuvenation technology can't come soon enough.

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