Norman Wilson writes: Well, this isn't specifically about his character, but the story of how I first met Ken and Dennis is amusing. And it was a long time ago so some of the details may be slightly off. I was a summer student working on the second floor of Building 2. My MO was to bike up to the labs every morning, and I do mean up if you've ever been on Glenside Road. I would work until dinner time, bike home, have dinner, borrow the car, and go back to the labs and work until I was almost too tired to drive home. In the wee hours one night I was waiting for something to run and was getting hungry, so I headed up the the food machines in the attic on the 6th floor. While I was waiting for my food I heard a very mechanical sounding voice going "fuck fuck fuck fuck ...". I had to investigate. Under a heating duct there was a door with a frosted glass window on which was an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper on which the word UNIX was spelled out in black electrical tape. It was the source of the sound. I opened the door and discovered Ken and Dennis and maybe some others playing with their recently acquired Votrax speech synthesizer which they were teaching to swear. I also remember in later weeks that it would announce "x o'clock and all is well" on the hour where x was the current hour. I think that maybe everyone was high on the smell of the developer for the C/A/T paper. Jon

I hung out with Dennis at various conferences and had various emails with him over the year. He was usually quiet but did have a wry sense of humor. Mostly at the conferences, he was content to hang out with us in the lobby or wherever. If you didn't know who he was, he looked just like the rest of the UNIX geeks. He was very caring, and I got a condolence email on the passing of a colleague. The most unexpected one was that back in the day on one of the mailing lists, I think it was INFO-MICRO and not UNIX-WIZARDS, someone was talking about since Andrew Fluegelman had died recently and he is generally credited with the idea of shareware, that it be renamed fluegelwaer in his honor. In my rebuttal I suggested that we rename the C compiler Ritchie. I got a quick "Let's nip this in the bud right now" letter from Dennis. One year while working for the Army I made up a bunch of No Ada t=-shirts and sold them at one of the conferences. I gave Dennis one and I always got a chuckle when I saw pictures of him wearing it later. If you have Peter Salus's UNIX history book, there's a picture of him wearing it there.