Today in 1973, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson presented their first paper on UNIX at the Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP).
The paper was later published in the July 1974 issue of Communications of the ACM. Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award in 1983 for “their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system.”
In his Turing Award lecture, Dennis Ritchie asked the question “Can the circumstances that existed in Bell Labs that nurtured the UNIX project be produced again?” and answered:
Time, and a commitment to the long-term value of the research, are needed on the part of both the researchers and their management. Bell Labs has provided this commitment and more: a rare and uniquely stimulating research environment for my colleagues and me. As it enters what company publications call "the new competitive era," its managers and workers will do well to keep in mind how, and under what conditions, the UNIX system succeeded. If we can keep alive enough openness to new ideas, enough freedom of communication, enough patience to allow the novel to prosper, it will remain possible for a future Ken Thompson to find a little-used CRAY/I computer and fashion a system as creative, and as influential, as UNIX.