Reflections on Software Research

The A. M. Turing Award which is the Association of Computing Machinery's highest recognition of technical contribution to computer science was presented jointly to Dennis M Ritchie and Ken L Thompson of AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1983 for their development and implementation of the UNIX time sharing operating system. UNIX was conceived by Thompson and developed jointly with Ritchie in the late 1960's. The development of C programming language by Ritchie was crucial in making UNIX portable. Ritchie and Thompson gave separate acceptance speeches at the award function. Ritchie's lecture which appears below focused on the nature of the environment at Bell Labs in the 60's that made the development of UNIX possible.