Dennis M. Ritchie heads the system software research department at Bell Laboratories's Computing Science Research Center.

Ritchie joined Bell Laboratories in 1968 after obtaining his graduate and undergraduate degrees from Harvard University. He assisted Ken Thompson in creating Unix, and was the primary designer of the C language. He helped foster Plan 9 and Inferno.

He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and is a Bell Laboratories Fellow, and has received several honors, including the ACM Turing Award, the IEEE Piore, Hamming, and Pioneer awards, the NEC C&C Foundation award, and the US National Medal of Technology.

LinuxWorld.com: Can you introduce us to Plan 9 (see Resources for a link), the project in which you're currently involved, and describe some of its novel features?

LinuxWorld.com: C and Unix have exhibited remarkable stability, popularity, and longevity in the past three decades. How do you explain that unusual phenomenon?

Dennis Ritchie: Somehow, both hit some sweet spots. The longevity is a bit remarkable -- I began to observe a while ago that both have been around, in not astonishingly changed form, for well more half the lifetime of commercial computers. This must have to do with finding the right point of abstraction of computer hardware for implementation of the applications.

The basic Unix idea -- a hierarchical file system with simple operations on it (create/open/read/write/delete with

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