"One guy McIlroy" was Doug McIlroy, head of computing research at Bell Labs at the time, the inventor of pipes, diff, etc., and an eminent guy. Before Thompson

"One guy McIlroy" was Doug McIlroy, head of computing research at Bell Labs at the time, the inventor of pipes, diff, etc., and an eminent guy. Before Thompson published his construction for matching regular expressions in the late '60s, Kleene's re work was pretty much purely theoretical. That's really the interesting story, solving an extremely difficult implementation problem on the machines of the era.