This is a little off topic but maybe it highlights the sort of people that worked there. When I was an undergrad I had some Unix question so I emailed Dennis R

This is a little off topic but maybe it highlights the sort of people that worked there. When I was an undergrad I had some Unix question so I emailed Dennis Ritchie (...!research!dmr) and asked him about it, we went back and forth a bit. Finally I asked him for his phone number and he sent it, I called him and we quickly sorted out my question. Over the years, I've called him a number of times. I suspect that if he were still with us he'd remember me, he seemed to enjoy chatting and passing on his knowledge. I had to think about to remember if it was just email or if we talked live. My phone database put that straight: $ call ritchie Dennis Ritchie 908-582-3770 (W/bell labs) I was just a kid in college, nobody important, I hadn't contributed anything of significance to the field. Yet he was happy to take time out of his day and share his knowledge. I've had the same experience with bwk, I had some ideas I wanted to hack into awk, emailed him and told him what I was thinking, not too long later I open up my mailbox and there is a tarball of ~bwk/awk, all the source, the docs, and the book in english and french. Bell Labs was something special, pretty much everyone that I've met/talked to who worked there were really nice people and more than happy to share their knowledge. They only cared that you wanted to learn (and that you had a clue). Smart (enough) guy who wants to learn more? Sure, here's my phone number. BTW, there is mailing list for old Unix hackers that I enjoy, if you like that sort of thing you might check out http://www.tuhs.org/ http://www.tuhs.org/ - it's got former Bell Labs people who comment on stuff pretty regularly. It's pretty nerdy, there is a long thread going right now about old Unix vulnerabilities (eg, passing the right negative number to kill(2) would get you root) but I find it fascinating. Another thread that's going on is why C choose to pass arrays by reference but everything else by value; another is a discussion of C's type syntax (not a lot of love for the pointer binding to the variable, people wish that "char* p1, p2" got you two pointers, not a pointer and a char.)