
Interview with Dennis Ritchie (2003) - zaiste
https://anders.unix.se/2015/10/26/interview-with-dennis-ritchie-2003/
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jxy
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...](https://anders.unix.se/2015/12/10/screenshots-from-
developers--2002-vs.-2015/)

I thought it was interesting to point this out.

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

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dynamic_sausage
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...

~~~
jxy
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...](https://github.com/0intro/plan9/blob/7524062cfa4689019a4ed6fc22500ec209522ef0/sys/src/cmd/dict/utils.c#L6)

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

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

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senozhatsky
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.

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

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

~~~
senozhatsky
> 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.

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m3andros
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?

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sys_64738
Interesting he’susing NT back then. Wonder if he uses WSL under Win10
nowadays. Cool stuff.

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aquabeagle
Dennis Ritchie passed away in 2011.

~~~
meruru
Rejuvenation technology can't come soon enough.

