Periodically I see a reference to Ken Thompson’s 1983 Turning Award Lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust, and I almost always end up commenting on it. It’s, by far, my favorite CS paper and I’m always delighted at the brilliant trick that it describes. The Jargon File calls it a truly moby hack and if you’re not familiar with it you should definitely follow the first link. The paper is short and very accessible.
The talk and paper are about that hack and it so outshines everything else Thompson had to say that it’s easy to miss a small but amazing unrelated detail. In the introduction, Thompson comments on his collaboration with Dennis Ritchie and how seamless that collaboration was. He says that in all the years they’d worked together he could recall only one instance of “miscoordination of work” In that case they both wrote the same 20-line assembly language program. Thompson was astounded when he realized they’d written exactly the same code right down to the character level.
Imagine being so in tune with a colleague that the only time you misallocate your joint efforts, you end up producing exactly the same output. That wonderful partnership shines through in the work that they created. Unix was so successful that Rob Pike argued, more or less, that Operating System research had come to a stop.