I don't think Don ever had a lot of crossover with the more academic world of Unix people, but he's one of my heroes and I have learned a hell of a lot from his works.
Not true at all. If you grew up as EE, in the late 1960s/early 1970s it was hard to not know about him since he was so prolific. FWIW, before I went to CMU, he was already a hero and I had a number of books from the late 1960's. When I was freshman in the early 1970s, his TTL Cookbook was an optional text for the intro to EE course [I already had it but a number of my mates had never seen it before]. His CMOS Cookbox was not published yet, but when it was, I bought it.