Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.
Before I'd written movies I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
