You got a link to back that one up?

No I read it in a book years ago. (Perhaps "Hackers", by Steven Levy.) The story, as I recall, was that Ken Thompson was working at Bell Labs, bored, and had an old PDP-7 (?) that had no software. He was bored and wanted something to run space war on, but to get there he needed an OS, compiler, etc.

You are right on that citation. Awesome, awesome book that really opened my eyes (as a 24 year old) as to just how far things had come.

See:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/spacetravel.html http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.pdf

Thank you. I have a better memory for trivial detail than sources!