R.I.P. Dennis Ritchie

[kiddten]

I dunno if some of you know who this is, but he is the creator of the C programming language and co-creator of unix.
Just thought I'd put this out there.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/business-of ... -40094176/

[Yarok]

[Mgalekgolo]

You obviously never talked to your parents about the 80s. My parents and all of their friends I've talked to stated something along the lines of: Steve jobs literally shaped their lives. We respect him now, and most of our parents respected him back then. I don't disagree with this mans achievements, he deserves more recognition of his death. But Steve deserves more respect than that. On a related note macs still sort of use the unix command prompt right? Thats what apple+S is at start up is I think...

[kiddten]

OS X is a unix based operating system.

[Mgalekgolo]

Oh yeah, well, same thing. Not really.

[kiddten]

Yeah, so pretty much without this chap here apple inc may have not gone so far as it has.

[Mgalekgolo]

Was [Apple 9] unix? You said os x.

[kiddten]

It doesn't appear that classic Mac OS was unix based, from what I can see on wikipedia.

[Excend]

Unix came with Darwin with came with OS X

[Kiyoshi]

If it wasn't for Jobs, Pixar wouldn't exist and I wouldn't even talk on a website called MACGamingmods. So go fuck yourself sir. Jobs was cool shit.

[Yarok]

I didn't make it. It's a bit harsh on Jobs, but the general statement is correct. People remember Jobs, but not Ritchie.

[nil]

People can relate to Steve Jobs more - who had a huge impact on the starting of personal computers and marketing. Possibly only a minority of tech people and programmers can relate to Dennis Ritchie - how many people really know what UNIX or C is?

Mac OS X is a UNIX operating system. Older versions, OS X 10.5 (PPC) or below were Unix-like. Similarly, all Linux distributions are Unix-like as well.

[Fonzeh]

Well to be completely technical, OS 9 was it own, when Jobs left Apple he created the neXt os, which was based off unix, when he returned OSX was based off next and it's UNIX foundation. every since 10.0 beta, the foundation of mac has been UNIX.

[Excend]

3 people have said this about unix.

[draconic74]

I was gonna post something about this, but school got in the way. Thanks for the reminder and post Bunneh.

Well... Lets see.

Jobs was the CEO of the second widely-used OS, which then created and dominated the MP3 player, online music/video store, podcast, smartphone, and tablet markets. I'm aware it did not create some of those, but it sort of perfected them first try and brought them to popularity. Not to mention the ever-growing share of the PC market, which keeps on growing. PC I use as "Personal Computer" here. Apple held a massive conference once a year, where Jobs introduced the new products that changed the electronics market. He was expected and anticipated every year to finally break the hype and rumors building up to the conference. And he pretty much oversaw all the design and production of Apple's products. How can you NOT know his name?

Ritchie, on the other hand, was a quiet, peaceful guy who worked at Bell Labs. He created a variety of programming languages and systems, and nothing today would be the same. Wiki has this to say however: "His death came a week after the death of Steve Jobs; although Ritchie's death did not receive as much media coverage, computer historians such as Paul Ceruzzi said his influence was comparable."


This is exactly how it is in the computing world. Everyone can see the shiny aluminum laptop with the sleek keyboard and glossy screen. They can see the OS boot up, they can click and type and listen and watch. But how many people have any inkling of what goes on to even make that possible? In the normal world you have Jobs, the guy that we all watch and listen to as he shows us shiny things. And then you have Dennis Ritchie, the guy who worked in the background to make the entire thing possible.

It is the end of Jobs, but for Ritchie it is ;