Steve Jobs was the visionary iman, but -rwxrwxrwx

[74-911]

I think Ritchie did much more important work. No Ritchie, no internet as we know it. Personally, I can live without Ipods, Iphones and Ipads but without C and Unix?? I don't think Fortan or COBOL or MSBasic or the various assembly languages from back in the day would have cut it with the internet.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/14/tech/innovation/dennis-ritchie-obit-bell-labs/index.html?hpt=hp_bn6

Just my opinion anyway.

[widebody911]

exit(0);

[wdfifteen]

Certainly the pioneers need recognition. There was a time when I thought the only way a computer would do anything was if I punched a Fortran (it was Fortran 4 by the time I came along) routine on cards and had the them compiled and "run" to see if I'd fuched up.. I remember feeling disdain for "canned programs" that did basic calculations without you having to program them and they always worked. Like you, don't think the minor stars in the galaxy get the recognition they deserve.
OTOH, the first on-screen editor I used was called something like "edison" and it didn't have a cursor. The only way you knew where you were was to type something and see where it appeared. I can't say I had a lot of love for that POS.

[red-beard]

Yes, I remember writing code in 66 character lines...

Funny, my programming days pretty much ended when I started to understand the power of spreadsheets, except for some specific new VB sequences built for spreadsheets.

The last Fortran program I wrote was a visual operator display editor translator. In 1987, I built an encoding system to distinguish live items from background on a computer operator display. The fortran program read the "background" file and created live object programming in the display units language. This cut down the Operator display programmng and debugging from a minimum of a week per operator display to maybe 4 hours. Subsequent changes and editing was similarly reduced and always worked.

Basically, it was a program to reduce programming. A fitting tribute to FORTRAN.

[Oracle]

No Ritchie no nothing.. I think the greatest side benefit was the rationalization of distinct platforms so finally a program in C would run anywhere..
I don't think there is a single modern OS/Language that is not rooted in C and no Kernel is not modeled after Unix...

RIP Dennis Ritchie...

[island_dude]

It is a shame that he left us so early. The man was a real visionary. I put my time in writing a lot of assembly language and 'C' was a huge step forward. He really left a legacy. RIP

[Aurel]

It is unbelievable how many great inventions came out of Bell Labs. The silicon solar cell, the transistor, the C language...And of course, things went downhill the government broke these great laboratories into the baby Bells in 1984. I was honored to have worked at one of them, Bellcore, which became Telcordia technologies, and is now an entity surviving on government contracts, where all the spirit of research and true innovation is long gone. I lived few miles from AT&T and Bellcore laboratories in New Jersey, and wish I could have had a long lasting career there, but these once great places of research are now what I would call ghost laboratories, where all the bright minds have escaped.

[tweezers74]

So true. It just shows you how media and social trends have more influence than anything nowadays rather than truth and knowledge...

[Dottore]

Originally Posted by tweezers74

So true. It just shows you how media and social trends have more influence than anything nowadays rather than truth and knowledge...

Yup. You have to come to PPOT for truth and knowledge.

[tweezers74]

Touché, Dottore.

[87911jon]

Ritchie designed the internal combustion engine. And Jobs designed the 911 around it. They were both visionaries in different areas. Hard for me to compare the two.

[BE911SC]

Fascinating! Thanks for posting this.

[Joeaksa]

Fortran and Cobol... eons ago this was my start on computers...

[nostatic]

Originally Posted by 87911jon

Ritchie designed the internal combustion engine. And Jobs designed the 911 around it. They were both visionaries in different areas. Hard for me to compare the two.

This.

[74-911]

Originally Posted by 87911jon

Ritchie designed the internal combustion engine. And Jobs designed the 911 around it. They were both visionaries in different areas. Hard for me to compare the two.

I think the more appropriate analogy would be:

Ritchie designed the internal combustion engine. Jobs saw a VW beetle and designed the 911 around it. They were both visionaries but in very different areas.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

More like:

Ritchie designed the internal combustion engine. Jobs saw a 911 and designed the New Beetle around it, while telling everyone it was faster than the 911. They were both visionaries but in very different areas.