While I knew of Carmack and Torvalds, I only recently read a bit about Kernighan and Ritchie. And that was only because I got roped into doing some maintenance on a rather old system, programmed in C, which used a syntactic style that I hadn't encountered before. A bit of research on some of the structures I saw lead me to pre-ISO standardization of the C language, where the closest thing to a standard was a book written by those two, and the resulting pseudo-standard referred to as K&R C.

I bailed out of that project as soon as humanly possible, by the way. Not just because of the ancient language, but the entire organizational structure of both the codebase and the team itself.