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.
That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.
From the time that I can remember I worked to make money - either baby-sitting or one year wrapping gifts at a department store at Christmas so I could have my own money.