Dennis Ritchie: The geek Prometheus

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on Nov 21, 2011 9:42 PM EDT
Salon
Mail this story
Print this story

Dennis Ritchie created no gadgets to entrance the lustful desire of hundreds of millions of well-heeled consumers, built no companies that bestride the corporate world like Colossus, and made no billions from his revolutionary contributions to the world of computer science. I would venture to guess that less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the number of people who took shocked notice of the passing of Steve Jobs would even recognize his name. Time magazine will not rip apart its next issue to put the news of his death earlier this week, at age 70, on the cover. But the co-creator (with Ken Thompson) of the Unix operating system and author of the C programming language deserves more than just a moment of silence from programmers everywhere.

I don't normally post articles if they are more than a day or two out but thought this warranted an exception - Scott

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: News Story

« Return to the newswire homepage

This topic does not have any threads posted yet!

You cannot post until you login.