Without Dennis Ritchie There Would Have Been No Steve Jobs
Last week the tech world lost one of its own -- a man who was a thinker and an innovator. Without him the world of computers, especially personal computers, would be very different.
That statement could easily describe Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs, who passed away two weeks ago. But I’m actually referring to Dennis Ritchie.
Ritchie is far less famous than Jobs. He's also largely unknown and unremembered outside of computer science academics and a handful of others in the world of business technology. Steve Jobs is already being compared to Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Ritchie's legacy is more likely to resemble that of Philo Farnsworth (the man who, if you don’t know, is arguably one of the first inventors of the television).
The interesting thing about Dennis Ritchie is that even many computer scientists don’t know much about him. In the online “History of Computers,” his name only comes up one time, as the co-creator of Unix with Ken Thomson when the pair were at Bell Labs.
This accomplishment, at least to those who don’t know the history of computers, probably in itself doesn’t sound all that impressive. However, were it not for Unix there would have been no PC revolution, no DOS, no Windows, no Mac, and of course no Linux -- the open source OS that is based on Unix.
In other words, without Ritchie there might not have been a Steve Jobs. Or at least there wouldn't have been the Steve Jobs who went on to create all of the innovative products that came out of Apple in the last three decades.
No doubt Jobs would have still done something big, but Ritchie paved the way.
The impact that Unix had the world of computers is still felt today. As I noted back in 2009, . So the whole concept of the cloud really goes back to Ritchie.
As Techcrunch noted last week, “The key to UNIX was the concept of sharing. The OS was begun in 1969 as a reaction to Bell Labs shutting down Thompson and Ritchie’s favorite operating system, Multics.”
Here the similarities of Ritchie and Thomson and Jobs and Steve Wozniak start to seem similar, too. They were rebels who wanted to do something a little different. And in the process created something that took the computing world a little further.
If Unix was all that Ritchie left it would be quite a legacy. But he did something else.
In addition to creating the Unix operating system, Ritchie also created the C programming language, which would eventually spawn C++ and Java. MIT’s Technology Review notes C’s importance: “It wasn't the first programming language, of course, but it was an especially important one, embodying an optimal level of abstraction -- intuitive enough to easily grasp, while technical enough to get the job done.”
Ritchie was a pioneer, an innovator, and a thinker. He isn’t as famous as Jobs or Bill Gates because he never built an empire out of his creations, nor did he create products that we needed in our daily lives.
But Ritchie did create the technology that allowed Gates and Jobs to build their empires and to create those products that we do use in our daily lives.
Were it not for Unix there would be no battle between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. There would be no Java.
Yes, someone else would have invented something else, developed something else. We can’t assume we’d still be using typewriters and relying on the fax machine to send documents huge distances. But we should remember Ritchie for his accomplishments, too.
The world could use more innovators like Ritchie and Jobs, thinkers who had that rebel streak to get ahead and improve the world, and to have fun while they did it.
