I'm ok with the honorary Dr thing but the article says he completed graduate studies. He actually quit grad school (MIT theoretical physics) for personal reasons and focused on software after that.

Taking about physics still always seemed to make him happy. I was once tempted to invite him to a study session for a QM class I was taking. He helped me with a problem set and his explanations were WAY clearer than the professor's or TA's. I think his understanding of the subject was simply better than theirs.

GCC was surely worth a non-honorary CS PhD all by itself. I can say that because the guy who wrote LLVM got one for doing basically the same thing 30 years later.