Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

Summary

This quote highlights the significance of the breakthrough achieved by Thompson and Ritchie in the field of operating systems. They identified that the hardware and compiler technology had advanced to a point where it was feasible to write a whole operating system using the programming language C. By 1978, they had successfully adapted the entire environment to various machines of different types. This discovery marked a crucial milestone in computer science, as it allowed for more efficient and compatible operating systems to be developed and implemented across different hardware platforms.

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