Tom Lyon ✅New, long, oral history of Ken Thompson, my and everyone's hero.
From the Computer History Museum: https://computerhistory.org/blog/a-computing-legend-speaks/
Click thru a while to get a text transcript.
ednl 🇪🇺@aka_pugs What do you make of this story where they had to cut to black; who was "some major US manufacturing company [who] has paid every one of these people to make this lawsuit, and it brought the whole thing down"? Apple perhaps, or Microsoft. I think the latter more likely because they have a search engine, but "manufacturing co." seems less apt.
@ednl I've heard before that it was Microsoft.
@aka_pugs I guess his phrasing could be a tiny bit of deliberate obfuscation. Probably my ESL understanding of "manufacturing" is slightly different, or maybe he equates hardware and software more than how I now think of them. He does also say on page 14: "mentally, there's no difference between a hardware patent and a software patent, basically you could build hardware to do this."