There's a silence for that.
Oct. 14th, 2011 09:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogI can't believe how little press there's been over the loss of a giant in the computing world. Who applied computing powers in ways and to extents never before imagined and thereby changed the world forever.
Who dared to think different.
No, not Jobs. This guy:
Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie is reported to have died at his home this past weekend, after a long battle against an unspecified illness.... He was the designer and original developer of the C programming language, and a central figure in the development of Unix. He spent much of his career at Bell Labs. He was awarded the Turing Award in 1983, and the National Medal of Technology in 1999.
Without C, and without Unix, we would not have the Internet we now know. We might have one, but it would probably be called Microsoft Internet and there would likely be a coin slot in place of one of the USB ports on your computer right now.
"Ritchie's influence rivals Jobs's; it's just less visible," James Grimmelman observed on Twitter. "His pointer has been cast to void *; his process has terminated with exit code 0."
Post over.
Who dared to think different.
No, not Jobs. This guy:
Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie is reported to have died at his home this past weekend, after a long battle against an unspecified illness.... He was the designer and original developer of the C programming language, and a central figure in the development of Unix. He spent much of his career at Bell Labs. He was awarded the Turing Award in 1983, and the National Medal of Technology in 1999. Without C, and without Unix, we would not have the Internet we now know. We might have one, but it would probably be called Microsoft Internet and there would likely be a coin slot in place of one of the USB ports on your computer right now.
"Ritchie's influence rivals Jobs's; it's just less visible," James Grimmelman observed on Twitter. "His pointer has been cast to void *; his process has terminated with exit code 0."
Post over.
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Date: 2011-10-14 01:25 pm (UTC)If that whole "they die in threes" thing is true, I wonder who the third major geek icon will be.
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Date: 2011-10-26 09:32 pm (UTC)I did not want to answer this at the time on account of the potential for bad mojo, but I think we just got our answer:
AI Pioneer Dies at 84 (http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6c8988a27b0222231b674fcce5f8f245)
ETA. And that is SO not the icon I intended, but it's so surreal, I'm gonna leave it.
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Date: 2011-10-15 02:54 am (UTC)http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/10/why-fsf-founder-richard-stallm.php