Dennis Ritchie dies at 70

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...he died 10 days ago. I haven't heard the news because I haven't been visiting my usual tech forums lately. Minimal mainstream media coverage.
99% percent of you don't even know who he was. There goes your tech revolutionary, the man that can be compared with Tesla and other big names.

The work of his life, UNIX, is what's running under that shiny Mac hoods.
His top tier contribution, the C programming language, is what that shiny Mac hoods were programmed in.

He believed in open source and didn't care for brands or other capitalist bullshit. His work was accessible to all of us.
Yet the man who took opportunity to package someone else's work into a shiny box with a big brand logo gets all the praise.

Before Steve Jobs, we had music players, we had smartphones and we had thin laptops. I agree - they weren't sleek and usable as after his products took the lead, but we had them.
Before Ritchie, we didn't have a usable high-level programming language, we didn't have usable small computer multitasking operating system. Several years after those inventions, students at UCB created the first TCP/IP stack. Without that, there would be no internet.

If people like Ritchie didn't exist, Jobs would fill his glancing aluminum cases with complete void.
This is the sorry state of the world we live in today.  

R.I.P.
 
I only saw this yesterday on Wiki...seems nobody really knew. A forgotten giant in many ways. This is the guy who started a lot of what I really hold dear. The idea of the community project.

Thanks for the ride, pal.
 
To compare Jobs and Ritchie to Edison and Tesla is not inappropriate. Jobs made what Ritchie did into the smooth supersex that we know as Apple. Edison did the same to Tesla (if in a significantly more assholey way).
 
Forostar said:
Thanks for informing us Zare. Jobs' death was too much for the man.
Click to expand...

They were not directly affiliated in any way.
The works, and derivatives, of Ritchie were used,and are used today by tons and tons of companies apart from Apple.

Ritchie co-authors UNIX and C programming language, while working for Bell Labs. Original UNIX source code thus belongs to Bell Labs. Bell's computer research division was bought by AT&T meanwhile. Under state contracts, University Of Berkeley gets the whole AT&T UNIX  system, including source code, for academic usage, which spawns BSD variant of UNIX after students and staff starts upgrading it with their own stuff. In mid'80s Jobs resigns from Apple and founds NeXT Computers. They had a system called NeXTSTEP which used BSD UNIX and Carnegie-Mellon University's CMU Mach (another free academic project) at it's core, with primary programming language being Objective-C, a direct C variant. NeXT's sofware was powerful and influential, but much of it was compiled from academic projects. Since Jobs left, Apple was going down, and about a decade later (1996), the deal was done - Apple bought NeXT, and Jobs returned.

The old MacOS was dumped and new one, called Mac OSX, came to life. In essence, NeXTSTEP with similar user interface as old Mac OS. They've replaced old BSD UNIX code with FreeBSD one, and that's about it.
Thus, via paths of academic projects such as BSD UNIX and CMU Mach, the core of Apple's operating systems today can be attributed to Dennis Ritchie.

Don't get me wrong, nobody stole nothing; the 2-clause BSD licence permits anyone to take the source code, and integrate it with their own software as they wish and retain full rights. You just need to put original software's author somewhere in the credits.
But credit where credit's due...while Jobs and his bunch were thinking about designs and business models, someone else's code was doing all the hard work in the background. So calling Jobs a technological revolutionary is just plain wrong. Jobs was an excellent businessman and a design / branding prodigy. Dennis Ritchie was a technological revolutionary.

To compare Jobs and Ritchie to Edison and Tesla is not inappropriate. Jobs made what Ritchie did into the smooth supersex that we know as Apple. Edison did the same to Tesla (if in a significantly more assholey way).
Click to expand...

It is inappropriate, because Ritchie never worked for Jobs. Dennis was an open-source pioneer, thus he wanted others to share and improve on his work. I'm just awestruck by the whole unfairness surrounding these two deaths.
 
I agree with you as to the unfairness. However, I think it proves the age old saying, people value what they pay for. People with a small 'open source' knowledge worry about 'free' software.

There is a large community that appreciates what he has done (we talked about it at work today). It is too bad he doesn't get the publicity he deserves. What a great product he created.
 
LooseCannon said:
To compare Jobs and Ritchie to Edison and Tesla is not inappropriate.
Click to expand...

Jobs, I agree... but Ritchie was a giant. UNIX is big, but the C language is huge. When I read the thread title, it was C (specifically the classic K&R manual) that I thought of first.

Ritchie is absolutely up there with Tesla, along with a very few other programmers like Turing and Knuth. Jobs was just a kid in their playground.
 
I wonder why there was nothing about this in the news. I first heard about this in Through The Looking Glass forums.
 
Thank you for the post Zare! In true Gates/Jobs fashion I am going to steal it and post it elsewhere as my own :).

RIP Dennis Ritchie indeed :(
 
Late reply. I wanted to answer this longer, but somehow I didn't yet.

Zare said:
They were not directly affiliated in any way.
Click to expand...

Naturally I meant it more as a "joke" (though it's not entirely unrealistic):

Ritchie was so gutted by the in his opinion exaggerated attention for Jobs' work (after Jobs' death) compared to the credits he got for his own work, that it accelerated the bad state of his health, so he went soon (within a week) after Jobs died.
 
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