Dennis Ritchie, Grandfather of Your iPhone
Dennis Ritchie died Saturday just past. He isn’t as famous as Steve Jobs, but his work has ended up in just as many hands. He didn’t invent the iPhone, or the Mac, or the iPad, but as the man who created the C programming language, and one of men responsible for the creation of Unix, his contribution to these devices is almost as big as Steve’s.
His work, ten years before the first Mac was even released, became the foundation of the OS that made it possible for the Mac, and Apple, to survive. Apple then took that OS and created the first truly popular smartphone, then the first truly popular tablet. Without his work to build on, it’s likely that Apple wouldn’t have survived the last decade, and that we’d never have had these wonderful toys.
As Tim Bray says, we’ve “been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years”, and it’s infinitely better for his work.
Further Reading
- The Guardian’s obituary for Dennis Ritchie, which as a good potted history of the development Multics and Unix, and the wider impact of Unix;
- The _New York Times’s obituary, which also has a short history of his work;
- ZD Net’s article “Without Dennis Ritchie, There Would Be No Jobs”;
- Dennis Ritchie’s home page on the Bell Labs website, which has a wealth of Ritchie’s own papers on Unix.
Notes
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