In October, 2011 the whole world was shocked, pained, thunderstruck and what not, to see Steve Jobs die. A visionary genius who had pioneered the persona computerrevolution, Jobs was a man of many talents. Despite having been an adopted child and a misguided teenager who had even turned into a hippie and fled to India, the to-be-founder of #Apple had returned and restarted his life, bringing about one of the greatest visions the world had ever seen.
Without Jobs, we would not have the Macintosh, iPhone, iPod, iPad, iTunes and Apple itself! But pardon us for saying that Apple Inc isn't the apple of everyone's eye, and for good reasons. His visions and ideas were revolutionary, but as far as genuine technological contributions to the field of computing in general, Jobs ranks well below the second man featured in the image.
Dennis Ritchie?! Who's he?
This is what we get to hear, whenever we mention him to most technology users of this generation, sadly.
Dennis Ritchie was the man who had designed the C programming language, without which, much of what sophistication we see, wouldn't have been around. C has been hailed as God's own programming language, thanks to its virtual omnipotence when it comes to designing software from scratch.
And we must remember the time and the purpose for the designing of C - with his colleague Ken Thompson, Ritchie had wanted to design an industrial-gradeoperating system, that would be called UNIX. But the original UNIX was scrapped, and they needed a better way (and language) to build the UNIX kernel (the original kernel was coded with a machine-dependent assembly language) a better version of UNIX. The result? God's own programming language - C.
It is analogically similar to when Newton had discovered that the mathematics of his day wasn't sophisticated enough for his physics, and therefore he developedcalculus to compensate for that.
The UNIX operating system
The UNIX operating system can be called the granddaddy of virtually everything you have today, be it an Android or iOS phone, a Windows-powered PC, a Macbook pro or a Linux/BSD box.
Following UNIX's success, Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum had devised a free clone of UNIX, called Minix, which gradually inspired Linus Torvalds to build the Linux kernel, which forms the core and foundation of hundreds, if not thousands, of GNU/Linux operating systems (distributions) like Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian and Slackware to name a few.
Similarly, FreeBSD (Berkerley Software Distribution) contained original UNIX code, and it is (together with other BSDs) a robust OS for server-side capabilities and eve day-to-day needs. It is mostly from FreeBSD and NetBSD that the first Mac OS was developed, with the Mach kernel.
And even the Windows itself has been influenced by Xenix, Microsoft's own UNIX-like solution that was later discontinued.
So, if you're using an iPhone or an Android to read this post, please take a moment to remember Dennis Ritchie, the man without whom none of this would be possible.
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