I’ve been catching some flak from readers for having not written a column on the recent passing of Dennis Ritchie, father of the C programming language and co-author (with Ken Thompson) of UNIX. Ritchie also wrote with Brian Kernighan The C programming Language, which we all have on our bookshelves and some of us have even read. Ritchie was easily a greater contributor to computer science (as opposed to the computer business) than Steve Jobs, yet I wrote about Jobs’s passing and not Ritchie’s. What’s with that?
The simple fact is that I didn’t know Dennis Ritchie. I did know Steve Jobs for 34 years and felt I could write about him. When I wrote about Claude Shannon it was because I knew him, too (we juggled together). If Doug Engelbart or John Warnock dies before I do I’ll write about them, too. But Dennis Ritchie was this guy from Bell labs, a place I have never even visited. While he was the father of C, I was a son of ALGOL 60, APL, Forth, and even PostScript — definitely a Left Coast guy, though Bill Joy was, too, so I guess I really have no excuse.
I’d love to hear Bill Joy’s take on the passing of Dennis Ritchie is among the reader comments, below.
It is clear from the outpouring of interest in Ritchie and the sadness at his passing that here was a guy I really should have known. Why I didn’t make the effort I’ll never know. It’s just another one of my mistakes, sorry.
So rather than attempt to eulogize a man I didn’t know, what I’d like to do here is ask you to do the heavy lifting for me. If you knew Dennis Ritchie, tell us about him. If you have a strong sense of his contribution to science, share it with us. And most of all give us some insight into the man. What was he like, what did he like, what were his motivators, and in what way did he touch you?
I didn’t know him, but the C dialect crystallized all that was beautiful and possible with software. Yes, it lead to C++, Java and C#, but more than that it became the mother tongue that all software practitioners could communicate in.
I learned C from K&R C as so many others did. A great contribution.
That’s all I know.
@John Calling C the “mother tongue” is a brilliantly concise description. No matter how little many of the kids today will directly use C it permeates so much of all code written today and will likely do so for a long time to come.
I’m certainly amazed how much Dennis Ritchie accomplished and am thankful for our chance to collectively benefit from it.
I didn’t know Dennis Ritchie, either. What I *do* know is that his work changed my life and my world. I started out on an IBM System 3 (the oddball little computer with the undersized 96 column punchcards). I graduated from that to an IBM 1130, an IBM 360-75, then a Burroughs B3500 mainframe (as a field service tech, working for Burroughs on an Air Force base). The B3500 was the first mainframe to use the concept of virtual memory. Afterwards, I spent 6 or so years fixing Hazeltine dumb terminals, Televideo, Docutel ATMs, Wyse, etc. Then I got a job writing medical office billing software in COBOL. The company needed to move to a newer technology, so we got our hands on a Charles River Data Systems Universe 68 box, running UNOS. UNOS was derived from Unix System 3 (this would have been in the early 80’s). We ported all this COBOL stuff to the UNOS system, and I was hooked. After that company died, one of our rich doctor clients decided he wanted to sell his own medical billing software, so he hired my programming colleague and me. We got our hands on an AT&T 3B2 and started writing software in C. “The C Programming Language” was our bible. Kernighan and Ritchie’s “Software Tools” was another touchstone – it taught us the KISS principle – write something that frickin’ WORKS, and stream its input from something else that just frickin’ WORKS!
In the years since that job, I’ve worked on all manner of Microport, Interactive, SCO Openserver, SunOS, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, Linux, OS-X, IOS, and Android systems. None of that stuff would have existed if Dennis Ritchie hadn’t sat down in a basement at Bell Labs in New Jersey, and tried to find a better way to do Multics.
Thanks for a long career, working with elegant, logical concepts, Dennis. Too bad I never got to meet you.
My first computer experience was an IBM 1130 (1969). It changed my life so much that I went into computer science instead of electrical engineering. While I learned FORTRAN, COBOL, IBM 1130 assembler, BASIC (various flavors), PICK (who has heard of that one?), and a few other program languages that nobody ever heard of, I never picked up on C or any of it offspring. I guess I missed out, but then again, I was too busy working in the real world with COBOL and CICS to go off and learn a language that I didn’t need at the time.
I’ve heard of PICK.
I ran a restaurant in Fresno, Ca., and the software that ran the place ran on PICK. Everytime I needed a different financial report we had to contract with “the PICK guy” to get it done. I told the owner there was ONE GUY who knew PICK and if he died in an accident or something we were gonna be screwed.
Fortunately the restaurant died before “the PICK guy”.
I worked with Pick under the Prime Information variant with Info/Basic. Wonderful stuff, just before Unix and relational databases grabbed hold.
I was also a child of Algol 60, learned it before C was invented.
Hey folks, I AM one of those “PICK guys” (and Prime, and UniVerse, and UniData…). Yes, there are still a handful of us around.
And Dennis Ritchie had his influence here too. C was a language that we could write very small, fast applications to “glue” the Primos OS to Info Basic, or Unix to UniVerse, etc. So yes, the C language crossed all Hardware boundaries: from “Big Iron” IBM down to Microdata and Prime computers and down to the little personal computers (and even a derivative usable in iOS as objective-c).
So RIP Mr. Ritchie. Ya gone good!
I didn’t know Richie personally, but boy did I know his work. I began working on pre-release versions of BSD systems in early 81 while a student at Colorado State University. I worked as one of two student roots on our VAX 11/780 running the very first versions of BSD. We also had PDP and other systems that were running older AT&T Unix systems. Back then, the way you learned to program C was by reading the source code of the kernel and the utilities. I worked on numerous modifications and additions to accommodate our specific requirements at school. When I had questions, I wrote directly to the authors of the specific code. Both K & R along with BIll Joy, Rob Pike and others were not only my heros, but were great at responding to questions/suggestions/etc… Gene Spafford over at Georgia Tech and others were on the Usenet and we all helped each other.
As a result of that work, I got a job with Delecor helping create the first multi-processor UN*X system, called HEP-UX. From there to work for HP on HP-UX. All along the way, I used Dennis Richie’s work. I stood on his giant shoulders to accomplish what tasks were necessary to move forward.
The simplicity, speed and true genius of his work is stunning. As I write this, I’m on a system that is running another variant of that simply perfect OS. I cannot think of a better tribute than to use his work to write a tribute to him. My prayers are with his family and colleagues. He will be sorely missed, yet while we can no longer directly access him, we will always maintain in-direct access.
God bless Dennis Richie.
Practically everyone had heard about the personality and accomplishments of Steve Jobs, and seen videos and magazine articles of him, or at least photos. Personally I’m not sure I’d ever even seen a photo of Dennis Ritchie until after he died (I can’t remember if there was a photo of him in the copy of the newly published 2nd edition of K&R I got in 1988).
I’d be surprised if many, if any, people who actually knew Dennis Ritchie are reading here. On the other hand, there are lots of people around who knew Steve Jobs, or met or interacted with him in some way. (I was working at Apple during the NeXT acquisition, in the same building Steve Jobs got an office in, and I even have my own stories, but this isn’t the place for them.)
There’s been a fair amount of criticism thrown around by tech cognoscenti over the difference in responses to the passing of both men. I think it’s been unfair, both to those criticized and to memories of the men being honored.
Dennis Ritchie was a man whose work was widespread in technology but not recognized as such until after his death, much like many great artists of the past. I’d like to think he would have been very proud of the extent to which his work was spread by Steve Jobs. Similarly, I’d think that Steve Jobs would himself recognize and appreciate the magnitude of Dennis Ritchie’s contributions to computing and to his own success.
It’s inarguable that they both had a huge impact on computing and the world. It’s just simply a fact, though, that many fewer people had any kind of direct, personal or emotional connection with or about Dennis Ritchie the man. So it’s really not so surprising that his passing has garnered less widespread attention.
Jobs’s “accomplishment” was ambitiously marketing devices like the iPhone built on–you guessed it–UNIX.
For me learning Mr. Ritchie’s C was a right of passage. Like driving a standard transmission, your first girl “friend”, after C I could walk with men.
Hearing of the passing of Dennis Ritchie startled me in a subtle way, because he was just a bit more than a year older than I.
I learned C (and some Unix) in the late 1980s … (yes late in the life of anyone seriously working in computing).
I recall there was an attempt by AT&T to market a Unix machine on a x86 desktop … so so so slow even for that day.
But by way of Richie’s dual contribution I saw a glimpse of the future (I’m recollecting it was 1990-1).
An Indian friend invited me over to his apartment for dinner to celebrate with a friend of his who was about to fly back to India.
This fellow told me that he came to the States every year to win a new contract for work. He had just concluded a $1M deal with AT&T for porting portions of the Unix kernel … which he would unleash his small but growing stable of programmers to do back in India.
“I recall there was an attempt by AT&T to market a Unix machine on a x86 desktop … so so so slow even for that day.”
I saw that machine in Atlanta at a technology open house AT&T held for employees. My wife dragged me along and the guy demoing the clunky ‘nix desktop was glad to show it off to me as no one else seemed the least bit interested. I’d been using a 512K Mac for a few months and the childish graphics and slow performance of Ma Bell’s little darling left me underwhelmed. They discontinued it later that year and tried to sell them to employees for $350!
Ritchie — he should be lauded, yes, but IMO he’s not in the same category as great entrepreneurs like Jobs because he never effectively sold his ideas. Ritchie stayed in his safe, comfortable, little spot at AT&T and did nerdy things. God bless him, the world needs nerdy guys, but don’t equate him with the likes of Edison, Disney, and Jobs.
Bell Labs was composed of highly specialized groups in order to allow employees to do their own thing and flourish rather than get bogged down with details they would rather leave to others. Besides Ritchie, earlier examples of people making world changing contributions, without building a finished product, include the likes of Nyquist, Shannon, and Shockley. Also, starting in 1956, there was the “consent decree”, that limited AT&T’s participation in computer products to “switching machines” for phone calls. In another post, Bill Joy commented about the Bell Labs envronment and how it contributed to the development of C.
So what is your point? Ritchie could have quit anytime he liked. A real entrepreneur would have Left the mother ship, started a new company, and risked everything. That is what the great ones did. Ritchie had a cush job, nice perqs, and Ma Bell’s warm embrace. He deserves credit for his genius, but he’s simply not at the level of the guys that some are comparing him with.
My point is that not everyone wants to be an entreprenur. Nor would it be good for society if everyone had the same ambition. As another example, consider Albert Einstein.
Nice trolling effort. B-
I only met Dennis once – he dropped in on a USENIX around 1990 or so (I think – FIFO memory has cycled..) and was sitting in a corner playing with UNIX on an ATT Safari laptop. About a dozen of us recognized him and gathered around.
I remember one comment that hit me years later with its prophetic accuracy – he said something like “there’s no reason UNIX can’t be the OS of choice for laptops and desktops, it’s just unlikely to come from AT&T.” He had the air of someone who could see very far into the future and was doing what he could to steer us clear of the icebergs.
I didn’t know Dennis either. Before Dennis and Ken most operating systems were written in assembler. Their functionality was limited and there was a lot of time between improvements. None of the programming languages of the day were suited to writing an operating system. What Dennis and Ken did was to break with tradition. The created a more robust programming language and then used it to write an operating system. Their approach made it possible to write better and better operating systems over time.
Because the Unix platform was somewhat open and it was easy to add things to it, a whole generation of tools were developed. Things like email, firewalls, routing, telnet, http, etc can all trace their origins back to Unix and C.
If we had stayed stuck in the assembler based operating systems, we wouldn’t have the Mac OS or Windows today. The Internet would probably not be possible. A lot of things we take for granted today would not exist.
gee, except for the basis of Unix, Multics, which was (about 99%) written in PL1
Software Tools was written by Kernighan and Plauger, but I’m sure dmr had lots of input. What a great book that was at the time.
>give us some insight into the man. What was he like, what did he like, what were his motivators
This video tells us some about Ritchie and Thompson :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjvjqAVkvYo&feature=related
How thick is the K&R book, a half-inch or so?
How many CS books are that thickness today?
I believe the hidden link between Jobs and Ritchie is a deep love and understanding of simplicity and its power to change the world.
I’ve been thinking along similar lines lately. In the 1980’s, RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) processors emerged to solve problems with overly complex CPU’s. I think I’d like to go back to a ‘RISC’ language like C. Sure, modern languages and their API’s need fewer lines to accomplish a task, but there is still a challenge in learning which lines to write … and then they get replaced with different code that is even more complex. I rarely get a chance to master a language or API, these days, before it’s obsolete.
In their day, C and UNIX, despite their faults, greatly enhanced engineers productivity. We owe Dennis Ritchie a lot for that.
That’s the thing I agree with most. In my first class on C, back in ’93, we learned Richie took the position that C was a language for creating numerical and logical expressions, control sequences, and didn’t bother to differentiate between a function and a subroutine (procedure, whatev’). It also didn’t have any built in functions to call either.
Oh, but here’s this standard library that comes with every compliant version of the compiler, and if you use that library, your code will compile and run on any system that has a compliant C compiler. Any interfacing with hardware would be done through that standard library. Revolutionary! You could write a program once and have it run on a myriad of computing systems, regardless of the system architecture, OS kernel, or security subsystem. AND, that program would perform at speeds that were normally reserved for hand written assembler routines.
We wouldn’t have Java’s JVM, Apache’s HTTPD, IBM’s DB2, Informix/SQL Server, Windows, MacOS-X, Word, Outlook, Excel, Firefox, Thunderbird, Safari, and many, many other applications we use every day, on more than one CPU architecture, in more than one OS, without Denise’s contributions. Don’t forget we wouldn’t have an iPhone, iPad, or Android device either with out C. All modern computing devices and operating systems owe in part to Denise’s contributions to the world.
does anyone know of good tech blogs similar to Cringely’s? the ones like techcrunch just don’t cut it…
Sadly there are few like Mr. Cringely. Besides being a great writer a good part of his success comes from his network of friends and experts. I’ve known a few writers and columnist, none of them are as open as Bob. If you talk to Bob he will listen and process what you say. When you talk to others it is like speaking to a wall. Bob’s work adjusts to the changing times — because he has a network and it tuned into it.
Nice try, Bob in disguise!
I’ve never known Bob to use a “fake” account. When Bob responds, he responds under his own name and account.
Hopefully “paul allen” was being funny.
Nice try again, fake Bob^2!!!
I agree techcrunch is more like a news reporting site than original ideas and commentary. For that purpose, Slashdot can’t be beat. My list of people who write regularly on the ‘net and have interesting things to say about technology include:
– Don Lancaster
– Jakab Nielson
– Don Norman
– Brad Templeton
– Phil Plait (more science than technology, but like Bob’s audience, the commenters are often as interesting as the blog itself)
– Peter G. Neumann
I’d love to expand my list, so please feel free to add your favorites.
FWIW – I like Jesse Brown’s Search Engine podcast and blog at TVO (ww3.tvo.org). It is Canadian, and sometimes has a specifically Canadian orientation (e.g. interviewing a Canadian politician), but most of it goes beyond the local.
I built an Altair PC in 1975. After designing and building my first memory board, keyboard interface and interface to a cashregister printer, I began programming. First in machine language then assembler and basic.
About that time I found ‘The C programming Guide’ and red it several times. I began programming in C and never looked back. With all of the languages I have used, C will always be special At the time I looked up all of the information that I could find about Dennis Ritchie. I guess he was a bit of a hero and guide for me even though I never knew him.
It’s coincidental that my son, first year engineering, has to take a programming course which happens to be C. Just the week prior to I give him, not my first, but second edition K&R text which I had used and marked up cover to cover.
It sort of made me feel old, sad, nostalgic, and proud all at once.
Even today, his contributions are significant.
My little claim to history: I starting writing in C about 28 years ago, and probably wrote the first university thesis that used C, but had no connection to Bell Labs. (That was absolutely the only significance of the thesis.)
I mentioned this some time back elsewhere, and Dennis wrote to me questioning the date – that was almost before C “escaped” from BL. I was able to supply enough details about the situation to convince him I was right.
28 years ago from 2011 would be 1983. C was released ‘into the wild’ in the early 1970’s, along with its child Unix. By 1983 there were several commercial versions of C around. By 1986 or 7, even I had a copy of Turbo C on my shelf. Would you be meaning 38 years ago?
The really sad thing to consider is that with the passing of these two, the computer business/industry NOW appears to be more mature.
That said, I love to “touch base” now and then by watching “Triumph of the Nerds”.
I’m the same. I try to “Level Set” myself once a year and watch “Triumph of the Nerds” to remind myself how we got to where we are today. There are a lot of great lessons to learn from the past.
I discovered programming late in my college days. Too late to change my major.
So I took a six month course in IBM mainframe programming and started my first
job as a Cobol programmer. My employer provided trunking diagnostics for AT&T.
Our primary work was done on HP 1000 ice box sized machines and the code was either assembly or Fortran. This was when you booted machines from Mylar tape. One day a consultant showed up with a compiler and three days of classes for a new language AT&T wanted to standardize on called “C”. The language was concise, powerful and elegant. I was able to write production code by the end of the week.
It was Marvelous!! Soon K&R was on bookshelves in every cubicle and career transitions were under way. About half the young programmers on staff found their way to Unix, HP, Sun, etc. workstations then enterprise systems then data
centers and now back to Linux on X86. What a trip. All from dedicated hackers who told the suits they were working on a word processor.
Maybe I’m one of the few on this forum that met both Jobs and Ritchie. I put this in another forum this past week:
Herb S_____man introduced me to him when we shared a lunch table at a UNIX conference decades ago. Herb and John R__e had been ad hoc academic advisors (I’m not a computer science guy) in school and they knew I had worked for the “militant midget”, an executive at the company whose actions had triggered Bell Labs to start the Unix ball rolling. The militant midget story is unfortunately still confidential after almost 60 years.
Herb introduced me as a “Nuke” (which I am) and added “you know, he’s one of the guys in the business you were in before you decided to have fun and be productive for society”. He laughed, then smiled as he said: “So I take you hate “C”, don’t you? My response was “Yes” which is what he expected, that I loved FORTRAN although he was taken aback that I had worked with ALGOL, BASIC, APL, PL/I, RPG and COBOL. I also added I hated BAL/360 and COMPASS (CDC 6600 assembler). “An interesting eclectic mix of languages you’ve learned there” he responded. “Shows you improvise rather than complain, which is the mark of a true engineer. How many languages have you worked with?” My response was: “Real valuable languages or electronic ones?” He then really smiled and said “this is going to be fun” and we went into why engineers should normally dislike “C”. We shared a lot of things in common, being in the IT industry but having been educated in another discipline. We both looked at the computer as a tool to be exploited, harnessed and optimized for our work, not as a consumer and entertainment toy. I guess that view made us poor engineers, unlike Jobs and the other CEO exploiters in the industry.
He was a real nice guy and a gentleman to boot. We had a great time talking about some people we knew in common and why coders always get relegated to the back office while the salespeople and industry confidence men got the glory. I remember he almost bent over laughing when I called one of my school advisors, Maurice Halstead, “Chicken Head”. He thanked me for telling him that “C” sucked, explained to me why engineers not in the software business would naturally hate it, extolled its failures and then solicited input on how to fix them without disabling “features” like memory leaks “which are necessary”. We mourned the assassination of “Future System” and the rise of its revenge, the single level store, single address system, which is now called the IBM I-Series. It was certainly one of the nicest and productive lunches I ever attended in my almost 40 years in information technology.
He changed the world without cheating, fooling, hoodwinking, berating or belittling anyone, unlike Jobs. He was smart and sure of himself and his place in history. He was smarter and certainly more brilliant than Jobs, but was a better living being because he was humble about it. Unlike Jobs, he was more interested in the fun and fascination of a journey of endeavor than he was in the journey’s final financial results or in gaining any earthly physical possessions.
I didn’t have a book for him to autograph, but we did get a Hilton napkin and a 132 column paper ruled printout that he did sign for me. He added “that’s more classy anyway”, which is probably true. I guess it’s more valuable now that he’s gone to the big bit bucket in the sky.
RIP, my good colleague. I’m sure wherever you are there are no more memory leaks and rogue hardware timers out of control and you’re relieved,laughing now that you’ll be in heaven in 2038 when the UNIX clock you built finally fails after 78 years through no fault of your own!
Hey NE, I should ban you for double posting — using my copyrighted materials (read the tos) on another site. You and Asskissimov are now on my watch list, and any additional infractions will bring out the ban-o-matic.
Just curious about the name of the site so, should I come across, I’ll remember not to post anything I may want to reuse elsewhere.
Too bad, Karl, it was a copy of a text I wrote on a 3rd site. The copywrite would apply to your site’s version. This copy has some changes.
But anyway, thanks for the warning. That’ll stop my posting there pronto.
Not a chance in hell that’s actually karl.
I re-read the TOS and had a lawyer look at it as well. You’re full of it “Karl”.
The so-called “Karl” making this statement is an imposter and a troll.
Anyone who posts anything on my site (Tickerforum) owns what they post, of course, and is welcome to use **their** work wherever else they’d like.
Compilation copyrights are both legal and enforceable. Stealing someone **else’s** material may be honored more in the breach than the observance on the Internet, but it’s still stealing and the owner of the material has every right to come after thieves should he or she choose to.
There are a handful of trolls out there who love to run various forms of slander around the net aimed at me. The owner of this site is welcome to verify the IP address from which this reply was posted and the IP address to which the email address I was asked for (and which is not displayed) maps to – they’re the same, and the domain is owned by me and has been for a very long time.
‘Nuff said.
PS: My Eulogy for Dennis was posted here:
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2747994
Dennis was a gentle and intelligent man.
I first went to Bell Labs as a graduate student arriving at Bell Labs having made a lot of changes to code he had written. I was proud of what I had done and he was very kind in meeting me. Bell Labs was an amazing place, and not just the computer science area. Both Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were warm and accepting though they disagreed in part with what I had done–I was trying to make UNIX both more robust and friendly to use. They were fine with the former, but preferred the system’s more Spartan style to the latter. (My text editor “ex” had textual error messages which told you what was wrong with a command the original UNIX “ed” just said “?”.)
Dennis, with Ken, made a huge contribution not only with the UNIX operating system but also in creating the “C” language from its more humble “B” beginnings (which, in itself was derived from BCPL from, I believe 1959.)
C has been incredibly successful, spawning most of the programming languages
for systems type software as its descendants–C++, Objective-C, Java, C# and others.
I hadn’t seen Dennis since Java emerged in the mid-1990’s. I never got a chance to talk to him about how he felt about Java and the other languages which were derived from C. I was around Bell Labs earlier when Bjarne Stroustrup was creating C++ working in the same department as Dennis.
There were interesting discussions. Bjarne had the same philosophy as Dennis did–of keeping the language close to the machine, but I had the feeling that Dennis preferred the simplicity of C.
People have commented on how clean and simple K&R (Kernighan and Ritchie’s book on the C programming language) is. When, with James Gosling and Guy Steele, we went to write the Java Language Specification as a book
I thought we could describe Java with not many more words than K&R had described C. I was wrong, both because Java is actually much more ambitious than C, and also because we tried to define the language much more completely.
Reflecting on this now, more than 10 years later, only increases my admiration for what Dennis did with C.
Dennis’ language work bridged us from a language done in the era of the first FORTRAN languages (BCPL) to the languages we largely use today, which languages stand on his shoulders. Computers are so powerful compared to those on which Dennis created C that that it’s hard not to believe that there will be more powerful programming languages in the future that provide better tools for programmers. I hope they will be as clean and simple as “C”…
When did you work at the labs? My father passed away this summer, after a 40 year career and I have fond memories of both Brian and Dennis over at our house for dinner, not having a clue who they were until I went off to college. Later in life I was able to email them directly with my email account on “thumper”
I apologize for intruding on your appreciation of Mr Ritchie, but several of your comments took me back to my early days working for the US Navy. While some of you older guys wrote code on punch cards, I was on the other side of the business writing sheet upon sheet of information for the keypunch gals to produce cards that ran through those huge machines to compile data for my projects. Then R. W. talked of repairing slave terminals by HAZELTINE, TELEVIDEO & WYSE. These were the terminals we used attached to an ALPHA MICRO system when the base first allowed organizations to escape from the centralized IT group. Before that we used old HP calculators that would store a 16K of data, and to expand the storage capacity we would stack several machines together. Like Ross stated, often I enjoy the comments almost as much as the original blog. Thank You.
This conversation about Ritchie and Jobs got me thinking about Nikola Tesla. Really Tesla made huge contributions to electric power distribution and radio, but Edison tends to get more popular historical credit for electricity. This may be a poor comparison but if Steve Jobs is Edison who is our modern day Tesla?
Edison was the tech guy. JP Morgan (a banker) was the finance/sales guy. Jobs isn’t Apples Edison, that would be ‘the Woz’. Steve Wozniak. (sorry, Steve, I’m a terrible speller.
For Tesla, Nicoli Tesla was the tech guy, and the finance/sales guy was George Westinghouse.
It isn’t a straight up comparison. Dennis Richie is much more a development and technical kind of guy. Closer to a scientist than to an inventor.
For this comparison, Jobs isn’t at all comprable to Richhie. Jobs is much more comprable to Bill Gates. Both were more salesmen and PR guys than technical guys. The technical guys were Paul Allen and Steve Wozniak.
Edison is more remembered because like Colonel Sanders, he was also the front man for the advertising of the company. Tesla had a more sinister look and a foreign accent. Westinghouse therefore didn’t use him in the PR wars.
Nicoli Tesla was however the model for the ‘Mad Scientists’ in the 1930’s movies.
Too bad too, as much of what he did is still very far out there. If he hadn’t been so secretive, who knows where we might be now. Tesla developed a working wireless power transmission technology, and a ‘death ray’ plasma gun, though he only got it’s range to about two meters before he died. There were other things that are only now becoming useful, like the bladeless turbine.
No, in comparing Jobs and Richie, it is really more like James Clerk Maxwell to the old GE Reddy Killowatt. Jobs was a genius at PR and sales, who only dimly understood what made the thing go, but knew what he wanted to do with it and how it should look and feel, and Richie was a brilliant computer scientist who freely gave others the ability to do truly amazing things.
Two very different kinds of people, who each made it possible for other people to do many new and different things in very different ways, but who had very different motivations and very different talents and abilities.
We as a society need both kinds of people. We are all worse off for having lost them.
Bob, let me share this paragraph of the 1973 conference at the ACM in which Ritchie and Thompson presented Unix:
The UNIX Time-Sharing System
Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson Bell Laboratories
———————
Copyright(c) 1974, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
…
This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, October 15-17, 1973. Authors’ address: Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ 07974
———————
…….
Three considerations which influenced the design of UNIX are visible in retrospect.
First, since we are programmers, we naturally designed the system to make it easy to write, test, and run programs. The most important expresion of our desire for programming convenience was that the system was arranged for interactive use, even though the original version only supported one user. We believe that a properly-designed interactive system is much more productive and satisfying to use than a ‘batch’ system. Moreover such a system is rather easily adaptable to noninteractive use, while the converse is not true.
Second, there have always been fairly severe size constraints on the system and its software. Given the partially antagonistic desires for reasonable efficiency and expressive power, the size constraint has encouraged not only economy but a certain elegance of desing. This may be a thinly disguised version of the ‘salvation through suffering’ philosophy, but in our case it worked.
Third, nearly from the start, the system was able to, and did, maintain itself. This fact is more important than it might seem. If designers of a system are forced to use that system, they quickly become aware of its functional and superficial deficiencies and are strongly motivated to correct them before it is too late. Since all source programs were always available and easily modified on-line, we were willing to revise and rewrite the system and its software when new ideas were invented, discovered, or suggested by others.
……
I first learned Unix in the late 80’s on a Sun 3 workstation while working for an oil exploration company. I learned through the “Unix Programming Environment” by Kernigan and Pike. I was seduced by the simplicity and elegance compared to the mainframes I had been working with and the IBM PCs that were starting to get popular then.
Programming in C was a _pain_ compared to the FORTRAN I was used to, probably because it was so close to the machine. (Pointers…shiver.) But Unix was mature enough by then to have sed and awk and the Bourne shell and the Csh shell, so I only had to resort to C when developing actual applications. Tcl and perl were only a few years away. Unix made all those possible.
I became an Apple fan because of the simplicity and elegance, but to this day, I am a command line guy. GUI’s are great for doing one action on one object. They are OK at doing multiple actions to one object or one action to multiple objects. They suck at doing multiple actions to multiple objects. With Unix, running multiple actions on multiple objects can still be expressed elegantly.
At home these days, the objects of interest are music files, photos, and videos. Yet I run Linux instead of the more popular Windows and MacOS. I can trace the reason back to that seduction in 1989. Thank you Dennis Ritchie.
I’m not commenting on Ritchie, I know nothing about him. But, sorry, “C” was a terrible step backwards for software engineering. Because of the hype (mostly untrue) surrounding C, wonderful languages like PL/I and Smalltalk were shelved. It was truly the Dark Ages arriving for programming.
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Dave Coleman
I agree in so much as the popularity of one language eclipses another and consuming all the interest in the room. What may have been dark for the software programming was an absolute boon in OS development. I seriously doubt Unix in assembly would have been very portable and reimplementing in a higher level language than C would have been more problematic. Not problematic on the technical side, but problematic in that PL/I and even smalltalk are more complex (i.e. higher level) than C and would take much greater effort to port to new hardware.
Besides, aren’t all of those old fashioned languages supported by nearly all operating systems? I see from the IBM website one can purchse PL/I for Windows. Go knock yourself out…
Please read Richard Gabriel’s classic “Worse is Better” for the correct (IMHO) take on C and Unix versus the more “elegant” languages and environments…but I understand the cringing inside that comes along with learning to live with C.
Reading the comments here brought back many memories. I was a fledgling HW engineer hired into the Naperville location of Bell Labs to work on the #5 ESS switching system back in late 1980. There I met my first two loves. The Unix operating system and USENET. Oh I also picked up a little C knowledge but did little more than a “hello world” program until several years latter.
My tiny brush with greatness was that I would sometimes see postings by Richie, Kernighan, Thompson and other principle developers of Unix in the comp.* newsgroups. I never posted.
At the time, I didn’t think of the developers themselves as anything but creative group of developers on a unique mission. What I learned at that time was something very subtle about C and Unix.
1. C, as a relatively low level language, can be supported by relatively simple compilers, assemblers and linkers.
2. The simplicity of the tool set allows retargeting to new hardware.
3. Even though it started in assembly language, the conversion of Unix to C allowed retargeting the OS to new hardware.
4. This philosophy was more or less preserved in Minix, Linux and all that follows including Android.
Dennis Ritchie contributed to a seminal development that has evolved into host of new possibilities. To put things in perspective check out the following graph
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg
Do you remember Neil Haller on the #3 and #5 ESS projects?
I worked in the message switch group under Monty Johnson and I’m surprised I remembered his name let alone anyone else there. So sorry, no. But then there were about 350 HW developers and over 1000 software developers at the Indian Hill location alone working on #5. I was only there for 2.5 years.
That’s the first time I’ve ever heard APL described as a Left Coast language. Where I worked 30 years ago, APL was the punch line for an old joke about never letting a Harvard man near a computer! Actually, I was proud to describe myself as a full time APL programmer back then. Coincidentally, its creator Ken Iverson died 7 years ago this week.
I may be one of the youngest on here to comment being that I clocked into the world in 1982. I learned about Dennis Ritchie more in-depth after coming across his wikipedia entry a few years back, but to know not only did he develop the C language, or as the person early stated, “the mother tongue” of programming languages, he also contributed towards UNIX. I remember picking up a book on UNIX while in high school, and while I did not hear of Linux until the summer of 1998, (age 15) I knew of UNIX. I wish I would have dove into that world at that time, but was unaware I could get it for free (via FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc…). I have always been in awe of “the ones who started it all” and continue to research the past to understand the present. I appreciate Steve Jobs more for his role in things like Pixar than in Apple, for it drove me to my second interest of 3D Modeling/Animation. Dennis Ritchie though, laid the foundation of all foundations in that it spans across so many technologies that flourish today. Also, being a young African-American I appreciate the ease of access today of information as I have read of the past, was not as reachable as it is currently. Another unique thing amongst the code hackers and engineers is there is no “skin color” either, only the love and passion of the interests we all share. I would have loved the opportunity to meet Mr. Ritchie as it would have been an honor to pick his brain on “the old days” as well as his thoughts on modern computing and technology. From what I have read of other’s encounters with him he was a pleasure to be around and converse with. In closing, I wish to note that reading everyone’s stories about their experiences, from the Altair, COBOL, BASIC, ALGOL, to PDP systems was a really awesome treat, kind of like watching the Deleted footage from “Triumph of the Nerds” DVD so to speak.
The main face of the cards is young and trendy women. As long as you like the bag, as long as you worship trends.
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a great man