Interview with Steve C. Johnson
Naomi Hamilton (Computerworld), 2008-07-09
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/252319/a-z_programming_languages_yacc/

CW: What prompted the development of YACC? Was it part of a specific
project at AT&T Labs?

SCJ: "Project" sounds very formal, and that wasn't the Bell Labs way. The
Computer Science Research group had recently induced AT&T to spend many
million dollars on Multics, with nothing to say for it. Some of my
co-workers felt that the group might be disbanded... But in general,
Bell Labs hired smart people and left a lot of interesting problems
around. And gave people years to do things that were useful. It's an
environment that is almost unknown now.



That's my favorite thing about Plan 9. It is simple and lets you do
little clever things to make your life better.

	-- Matthew Veety (on 9fans ML, 2013-10-11)



If you think you need threads then your processes are too fat.

	-- Rob Pike



Mostly I use a text console, for convenience's sake.

	-- Richard Stallman
		https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html



I believed that our business was to do research to understand the power
and limitations of computers in so far as computers ought to be useful
to Bell Laboratories

	-- Sam Morgan
		http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/morgan.htm


The management principles here are that you hire bright people and you
introduce them to the environment, and you give them general directions
as to what sort of thing is wanted, and you give them lots of freedom.
Doesn't mean you always necessarily give them all the money that they
want. And then you exercise selective enthusiasm [...] over what they
do. And if you mistakenly discourage or fail to respond to something
that later on turns out to be good. If it is really a strong idea it
will come back.

	-- Sam Morgan
		http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/morgan.htm


I was told in my early career when I got a few patents that there is
always an interplay between the local patent attorney and the patent
examiner at the bureau of patents in Washington. And you had chit chat
for a while and then you get from the patent examiner a final
rejection. This patent is now finally rejected. All claims are rejected
and that is an invitation to put forth your strongest argument. You now
give me your best argument and I will listen to it. But I was told that
the final rejection is the last, last stage before you finally get some
things admitted.

	-- Sam Morgan
		http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/morgan.htm


While Berkeley arguably bloated things somewhat in improving its
functionality, gnu said 'here, hold my beer' in the 90s and we're still
holding the beer.

	-- Warner Losh
		https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2020-May/021282.html


I've long been fascinated by the prevalence of

   cat file | process

and think of it as a sort of triumph of the model. Pipes are more
natural than redirection as a human interface.

	-- Rob Pike, on TUHS, 2020-12-04


One of my philosophies is that the question is more important
than the answer. It's more informative than the answer, often,
[...] So we decided to focus on problems not solutions.

	-- Steven R. Bourne