Handles: dmr and Ken

Claim to fame: The driving creative force behind Bell Labs' legendary computer science operating group, Ritchie and Thompson created UNIX in 1969. An elegant, open operating system for minicomputers, UNIX helped users with general computing, word processing and networking, and soon became a standard language.

Unusual tools: Plan 9, the next-generation operating system created as the natural descendant of UNIX by Thompson and Bell Labs colleague Rob Pike.

Little-known fact: Although Ritchie is the author of the popular C programming language, his favorite language is Alef. Thompson, an amateur pilot, once traveled to Moscow to fly a MiG-29.