I emailed this to Amos Shapira directly, but seeing that our correspondence has been posted in the digest, I'll include this for the record:
I had the pleasure of meeting Ken Thompson at the Sydney University Computer Science Department in the late '80s. The Sydney representatives of Whitesmiths knew him and said, just ring him, he's very charming, tell him you want a chat and he'll happily oblige. I did that and turned up at the appointed place. It seemed he hadn't arrived yet. Because he worked for AT&T I had an image in the back of my mind of a business-suited, corporate type; there was only an overweight guy with long black hair and a beard hunched over a terminal, whom I mentally dismissed as "just a hacker from Computer Science". I sat back down outside to wait. After about 30 seconds, I said to myself, if Ken Thompson isn't a hacker who is? Of course, it was him. Interestingly, some of the issues we chatted about then, such as the desirability of maintaining the tool-box approach and not, say, hard-wiring a pager into the "man" command, have been altered by the huge improvements in processing speed and memory, just as the "-e" got chopped off "creat()". Cheers, Malcolm Johnston -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
