My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.
I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.
At the same time, much of it seems to have to do with recreating things we or others had already done; it seems rather derivative intellectually; is there a dearth of really new ideas?
For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.
At MIT, mostly what I did was documentation. I sort of read things. Wrote some descriptions of various aspects of the file system. Did not really do very much programming at all. At least on Multics.
The first phase of C was - really, it was two phases in short succession of, first, some language changes from B, really adding the type structure without too much change in the syntax, and doing the compiler. The second phase was slower; it all took place within a very few years, but it was a bit slower, so it seemed.
The visible things that have come from the group have been the Plan 9 system and Inferno, but I hasten to say that the ideas and the work have come from colleagues.
I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.
A new release of Plan 9 happened in June, and at about the same time a new release of the Inferno system, which began here, was announced by Vita Nuova.
C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
I'm just an observer of Java, and where Microsoft wants to go with C# is too early to tell.
Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new.
