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Two Pioneers Gone in One Week
14 years ago
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#!/bin/sh
printf "%s " "shouting into the void..."
( cat << HERE
printf "%s " "shouting into the void..."
( cat << HERE
In the last week, the world lost two pioneers who shaped the things we use and how we use them.
The one that the news covered extensively was Steve Jobs, co-founder with Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer. Apple didn't invent the GUI, but Apple made it popular and simple with the Lisa and the Macintosh. When relationships with his own company soured, he left Apple, founded NeXT and brought Unix to an equally easy to use and understand desktop, and he brought most of that back when Apple merged with NeXT and rehired Jobs. Then, there's the iPod. Just like the GUI, he didn't invent the music player, but he made it easy to use. There's so much that's been done that Steve Jobs directly influenced, and it changed the world for the better.
But the pioneer lost over the weekend is one who most of the world has forgotten: Dennis Ritchie. Together with Ken Thompson and a team of Bell Labs innovators, Ritchie invented Unix. The 40-year-old Unix operating system is still used today in places that may surprise you, most notably in every single desktop and laptop running Mac OS X. More than that, Unix was a case study for the fundamentals of modern operating system design, the fruits of which include the modern Unix-like operating system Linux. Unix and Linux together run most of the Web sites you use and depend on, as well as most of the most powerful computing systems and clusters today.
Ritchie's pioneering work isn't limited to Unix. He along with Brian Kernighan developed the C programming language. In addition to allowing the team to port Unix to new and incompatible hardware, C became one of the most frequently used desktop programming languages on any operating system, and C was the source of a number of languages attempting to improve on it, most notably C++ and C# ("see-plus-plus" and "see-sharp"), and to an extent influencing other languages, including Java and PHP.
And needless to say, without Dennis Ritchie, Unix, and C, there would have been no Linux, or Mac OS X, or Android as you know them today. Even Microsoft Windows, which inherited legacies from the unrelated CP/M and VMS operating systems, would look and work in a different way today.
Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie were two of the pioneers of computing whose influence and innovations changed the world for the better. The world will still miss both of them long after the world has forgotten their names.
A bit of trivia that's going to show my age: The Unix team, including Ritchie, wrote the first edition of the Unix Programmer's Manual in November of 1971, the same month in which I was born. Today, the operating systems I feel most at home using are Unix or a Unix work-alike.
The one that the news covered extensively was Steve Jobs, co-founder with Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer. Apple didn't invent the GUI, but Apple made it popular and simple with the Lisa and the Macintosh. When relationships with his own company soured, he left Apple, founded NeXT and brought Unix to an equally easy to use and understand desktop, and he brought most of that back when Apple merged with NeXT and rehired Jobs. Then, there's the iPod. Just like the GUI, he didn't invent the music player, but he made it easy to use. There's so much that's been done that Steve Jobs directly influenced, and it changed the world for the better.
But the pioneer lost over the weekend is one who most of the world has forgotten: Dennis Ritchie. Together with Ken Thompson and a team of Bell Labs innovators, Ritchie invented Unix. The 40-year-old Unix operating system is still used today in places that may surprise you, most notably in every single desktop and laptop running Mac OS X. More than that, Unix was a case study for the fundamentals of modern operating system design, the fruits of which include the modern Unix-like operating system Linux. Unix and Linux together run most of the Web sites you use and depend on, as well as most of the most powerful computing systems and clusters today.
Ritchie's pioneering work isn't limited to Unix. He along with Brian Kernighan developed the C programming language. In addition to allowing the team to port Unix to new and incompatible hardware, C became one of the most frequently used desktop programming languages on any operating system, and C was the source of a number of languages attempting to improve on it, most notably C++ and C# ("see-plus-plus" and "see-sharp"), and to an extent influencing other languages, including Java and PHP.
And needless to say, without Dennis Ritchie, Unix, and C, there would have been no Linux, or Mac OS X, or Android as you know them today. Even Microsoft Windows, which inherited legacies from the unrelated CP/M and VMS operating systems, would look and work in a different way today.
Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie were two of the pioneers of computing whose influence and innovations changed the world for the better. The world will still miss both of them long after the world has forgotten their names.
A bit of trivia that's going to show my age: The Unix team, including Ritchie, wrote the first edition of the Unix Programmer's Manual in November of 1971, the same month in which I was born. Today, the operating systems I feel most at home using are Unix or a Unix work-alike.
Heard about Ritchie's death on NPR. Felt like a stone had
dropped for a while. I know who's the more important of the two.
Got to use Xenix and CP/M at one time, and think I've
still got a VMS manual around somewhere (now doesn't *that*
date me?). Good journal. Saved.
FB.