Sceptical technologist

A tale of two giants

The father of Unix and C should be missed more than the father of Apple, but won’t be.

03 January 2012

Two giants of the computing world died in October. I want to talk about the lesser sung one because he did exponentially more for the computer and consumer electronics industries than Steve Jobs.

Dennis Ritchie, who died aged 70, has fingerprints all over almost all the technology we use for two main reasons: while working at Bell Labs, he co-authored the C programming language with Brian Kernighan and also co-developed the Unix operating system with Kernighan, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Doug McIlroy and Joe Ossanna.

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