Inventor of Unix?
“He also made significant contributions to the development of the Unix operating system, for which he received the Turing Award in 1983 (along with Kenneth Thompson).”
Definitely involved in the creation of Unix. Not sure how much time he spent on the actual code base, but C and Unix are joined at the hip: there would not be one without the other.
C language was being developed by AT&T and it evolved along side Unix. Many of the obscure things in C are there to help the Unix developers solve a problem they were facing at the time. Having pointers to pointers solved a performance problem in the scheduler, so they added it to the language. The scheduler gave us gotos as well.
I got my start in computers in 1986 as a repair technician and taught myself programming by reading AT&T System III Unix source and system diagnostics also written in C.