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Dennis M. Ritchie co-developed Unix with Ken Thompson and contributed the C programming language used to express much of the system. Their original paper connects this implementation choice with a practical system offering a hierarchical file system and composable process input and output.^[ref]

The scientific interest is the relation between abstraction and machine control: a language implementation must preserve operations on storage, arithmetic and interfaces while enabling a larger system to be written coherently. Ritchie's preserved Bell Labs homepage records the early Unix collaboration and identifies his historical work.^[ref]

Ken Thompson co-developed Unix with Dennis M. Ritchie and other collaborators. Their 1974 paper describes a compact multi-user operating system with a hierarchical file system, asynchronous operating-system processes and a user-selectable command language.^[ref]

One useful design idea is to combine small programs through a Pipe. The producing program writes an output stream and the consuming program reads an input stream; they need not implement each other's task. The operating system supplies the connection and scheduling. This makes composition a reusable system facility rather than a new integration mechanism for every pair of programs.^[ref]