Walfish recalls an incident when he was the TF on duty one night when the network went down in the terminal room.
"All these students were upset," Walfish says. "And then Professor Kernighan walks in."
Walfish and Kernighan went to the Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS) office together to try to get the network fixed.
They asked for the director of HASCS, who was not there. Upon telling the FAS worker that the network was down, the worker asked skeptically how they knew that.
"How do you know," Walfish says the worker asked. "Do you work for FAS Computer Services?"
"Just as I'm about to explain how I know, Professor Kernighan said very modestly, 'Uh, no, he works for me. I'm Brian Kernighan and introduces himself,'" Walfish says.
"Once they realized who he was and that he was a professor for a course here," Walfish says, "the FAS worker, and everyone else at HASCS who was on duty, was very obliging."
Walfish says Kernighan was then taken into the computer room.
"They cleared him through like three levels of security. They fixed the problem quickly," he says.
Background
Despite his widely acclaimed teaching ability, Kernighan has not always been in academics.
Since 1969, he has been doing research at Bell Labs in New Jersey.
The labs investigate the two types of problems that arise with computers, he says. First, machines are too hard to use. Second, they are too hard to program.
"When machines are unfriendly, it's because the machine isn't programmed right," he says.
Kernighan specifically focuses on the first problem and works on improving interfaces on computers to make them easier to use.
"Most of what I have been doing in the last couple of years are user interfaces," he says.
Kernighan says that although there are many rapid changes in the world of computer science nowadays, the basics of computer technology do not vary by much.
"You still have to learn the details, but I think the underpinnings are pretty much the same," he says.