I heard about this second hand, so anyone with first hand knowledge should feel free to correct me.

When AT&T took an ill-fated plunge into chip manufacture, our chips were on the large side. Dennis noted that "When Intel spoils a wafer, they turn the chips into tie-tacks. When we spoil a wafer, we turn the chips into belt buckles". This so infuriated the VP in charge of manufacture that he wanted "this dmr guy" fired. Needless to say, that didn't happen.

On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 6:53 AM, ches@Cheswick.com <ches@cheswick.com> wrote:

Dennis, do you have any recommendations on good books to use the learn C?

I don’t know, I never had to learn C. -dmr

Message by ches. Tappos by iPad.

> On Jun 29, 2018, at 3:53 AM, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> We do have ken on the list, so I won't be presumptious to ask for ken-related
> anecdotes, but would anybody like to share some dmr anecdotes?
>
> I never met Dennis in person, but he was generous with his time about my
> interest in Unix history; and also with sharing the material he still had.
>
> Dennis was very clever, though. He would bring out a new artifact and say:
> well, here's what I still have of X. Pity it will never execute again, sigh.
>
> I'm sure he knew that I would take that as a challenge. Mind you, it worked,
> which is why we now have the first Unix kernel in C, the 'nsys' kernel, and
> the first two C compilers, in executable format.
>
> Any other good anecdotes?
>
> Cheers, Warren