Friday, October 14, 2011

dennis ritchie, co-creator of UNIX, dies. what a legacy he has left!

oct 13th, 2011 CE

the spirit of UNIX -- that of building complex constructs from simple, well-defined building blocks -- remains at the heart of computing. sort of like LEGO.

two people: thompson and ritchie, wrote UNIX all by themselves on an old DEC PDP-11. compare this to thousands of developers at IBM creating OS/370 etc.

UNIX remains in everything: iOS, android, the open-source movement, etc. 

i was lucky to work at bell labs during the heyday of its research prowess. thompson and ritchie used to be among the resident geniuses who would play month-long games of 'go' in the cafetaria at murray hill, new jersey.

from 'good morning, silicon valley' of the san jose mercury news:

“I read somewhere that, while he wasn’t as famous as Steve Jobs, that his legacy was on the same level. I totally agree. He created the modern interactive operating system.”

— Dave Winer, blogger and RSS pioneer, on Dennis Ritchie, who has died at 70, reportedly after a long illness. Ritchie created the C programming language and was co-creator of Unix, whose “spiritual descendants”ZDNet lists: “Linux, Android, Mac OS, iOS, JavaScript, C++, the genius of the Internet and a world full of developers.” Ritchie worked at Bell Labs, which today told employees of the death of one of its “most respected researchers.”

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