Ken Thompson Quotations

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

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

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

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

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

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

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

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

I wanted to avoid, special IO for terminals.

That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.

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

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

You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.

The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.

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

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

The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The only way we can overcome the tragedy of an immense disaster like this one is by pulling together as a nation and doing all we can to help out our fellow citizens in great need, ... The people of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are not alone. Like the rest of our nation, the people of Wachovia want to lend them a helping hand so they can begin rebuilding their lives and their communities.

We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn't have records.

We're an International truck dealer, sales, parts and service.

The place we moved from is kind of an older location downtown.

Modern intensive farmland is a biological desert. Whereas if you tried to design a small nature reserve, you couldn't do better than the average garden - it's got all the required elements.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

My background for obtaining these ideas was uh, there was a I went to the school at Berkeley and there was a thing called Project Genie at Berkeley.

More precisely stated, the problem is to write a source program that, when compiled and executed, will produce as output an exact copy of its source.

I am confident that Tom's direction and guidance will ensure strategic continuity and sustained financial discipline, and he is already well known to our investor community.

I look for that number to be 50 by the end of the year. That's the key to our business ... our employees. We've got a very close-knit, dedicated staff right now.

He had a passion since he was a little kid to fly.

We're proud of our record fourth-quarter results and fourth consecutive year of double-digit earnings increases despite rising funding costs and related industry-wide pressure on margins.

There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.

Outside of operating systems in general tend to operate on programs and they have to somehow turn the notion of data and programs inside out.

My wife was working for a biotech company in San Diego when she walked away to become a mom, ... We have two children now and she plans to go back part-time someday. Any investing I do for her right now would be in education, to keep herself updated, ahead of the curve, especially since technology is moving so fast right now.

Lloyd will certainly be missed by all of our board members. He has been a trusted and valued member of our board since the First Union-Wachovia merger and we wish him well during retirement.

THAT'S THE trouble with wildlife gardening. For so long it's been a refuge for anecdote and old wives' tales that get handed down and trotted out. No-one's had anything original to say about wildlife gardening for years.

Most gardeners don't need me telling them that it's good to have year-round interest. You want a garden with as many flowers, for as long as possible, and that's what the pollinators want too. My advice is to garden just to suit yourself and the bees and the butterflies will be perfectly happy.

Today's outcome is a tremendous victory and a major milestone within the merger process, ... It is clear that Wachovia shareholders have strongly endorsed the compelling strategic rationale behind the Wachovia-First Union combination.

We are confident we are positioning the company for superior growth. This is what we want to be known for.

We are confident that shareholders will agree when they look at the facts, ... We believe that the SunTrust proposal simply won't work, and we are glad that the board has validated our view.

Tom is one of the most astute financial professionals I have ever known. We are incredibly fortunate to have an individual with Tom's talents assume the responsibilities of CFO for Wachovia.

We're establishing these funds because we know we need to look to the future -- to what will help this region thrive for years to come, ... We invite other businesses across the country to join us in contributing to these funds in support of this work, which is crucial to the Gulf Coast's long-term development.

We're especially pleased with solid fee income growth across the board, ... We see no signs of credit deterioration on the horizon.

Today's announcement reflects our board's confidence in Wachovia's performance and prospects for consistently growing earnings while maintaining a strong capital position.

UBS, City National Bank and First-Citizens are all unique banking franchises with different market strategies, but all recognize the value of being owners of The Clearing House. For companies with global operations or regional institutions focused in the U.S., The Clearing House provides the industry leadership and innovation that delivers a competitive advantage to institutions.

We are seeing the problems across the board. The fungus took advantage of the rain quicker than the grass.

Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress.

We have a binding legal agreement with Wachovia that we intend to vigorously pursue to consummation, ... We plan to continue the constructive merger integration dialogue which we've had over the past month and look forward to completing our merger with Wachovia.

Bob has been an outstanding leader at Wachovia for the past five years, which have been pivotal for our company.

The thing that's best is the public can see it.

The more I think about the nettle argument, the more it makes me laugh. This country's awash with nettles. Butterflies that eat them are not in any difficulty at all.

The bottom line for us is we are experiencing excellent revenue growth..., ... We have good expectations for the fourth quarter and all of 2006.

This is an excellent partnership that gives First Union a nationwide securities business, ... This transaction will substantially strengthen our distribution capabilities for equity capital markets activities as well as retail investment products and wealth management activities.

This is a policy I strongly recommend. If your employer covers 50 percent to 60 percent for it, pay out of your pocket and raise it to 80 percent coverage, ... When you leave work, generally you'll be left with that private policy.

This increase is consistent with our stated guideline for dividend payout.

There seems to be no public policy purpose for the zoning that is there ... This whole thing just smacks of special interest politics.

It's about a necessity to be on a major interstate in our line of business.

I'm very proud of our employees' ability to continue to generate record revenue, fueled by strong results in both our traditional banking and market-sensitive businesses. We continued to gain leverage from improving our efficiency, while at the same time investing significantly for future revenue growth.

I just know it has to be paid for, and it has to be paid for through productivity and the creation of wealth.

SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!

I am a very bottom-up thinker.

FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.

We have persistent objects, they're called files.

When in doubt, use brute force.

The steady state of disks is full.

For most of that time, I've also been a keen gardener, but for many years I failed to make the connection between gardening and science.

I also enjoy writing my regular column for Organic Gardening magazine, so I may do more of that sort of thing in the future, if anybody wants it!

I don't think there are many people up in research who have strong ideas about things that they haven't really had experience with.

I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less.

So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners' World addict again.

Just think, IBM and DEC in the same room, and we did it.

There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.

You can train yourself to notice this kind of wildlife. Next time you have some weeding or a bit of pruning to do, start looking at plants and ask yourself: 'What made that hole in that leaf?' or 'What's living in that hole?' You start to look at your garden in a completely different way.

Their laws aren't a good fit for escrow companies outside of California, and I think they're overly strict. They're trying to apply a law written for real estate escrow companies in California to any Internet escrow company based outside California.