You are not expected to understand this.
I made a lolgeek:
The photo is a 1970s Bell Labs publicity shot of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the main co-creators of Unix, working on a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer (original photo with more background). The text is a reference to an infamous comment in the source code of early versions of the Unix kernel (Dennis Ritchie's explanation).
The photo is a 1970s Bell Labs publicity shot of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the main co-creators of Unix, working on a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer (original photo with more background). The text is a reference to an infamous comment in the source code of early versions of the Unix kernel (Dennis Ritchie's explanation).
A. I recognised the computer and could single it out from it's tape drives!(When I was at university the computing dept used a PDP8: the mystery being I was Biology not computing or electronics)
B. I extracted the gist of Ritchie's explanation without too much strain.
I think the only thing saving me from full blown geekdom is that I'm lousy at writing code!
I have the Lions book and it's an interesting read if you know C and are into Unix - the original kernel was beautifully clean and elegant before they started bolting TCP/IP stacks and VFS layers and things onto it.