Ken Thompson Recalls Unix’s Rowdy, Lock-Picking Origins

The 82-year-old Ken Thompson has some amazing memories about the earliest days of the Unix operating system — and the rowdy room full of geeks who built it.

This month Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum released a special four-and-a-half-hour oral history, in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery, recorded 18 months ago by technology historian David C. Brock. And Thompson dutifully recalled many of his career highlights — from his work on the C programming language and Unix to the “Plan 9 from Bell Labs”…