This week in October marks the two year anniversary of the loss of two of the defining technological minds in our era. Most likely you have heard of one of them, Steve Jobs, but the other is hardly a household name. As co-founder, chairman, and COE of Apple, Jobs has been credited with revolutionizing not only the personal computing industry but the handheld computing industry as well. His name is attached to the iRevolution and his death was seen as the loss of a legend and mourned by millions two years ago on October 5th. That same week, the tech world suffered a second loss when Dennis Ritchie passed away at home to considerably less fanfare.
I would expect that most of you have heard of Steve Jobs, but very few have heard of Dennis Ritchie and know how deeply he has impacted the lives of everyone, be they mac, windows, or android users. Ritchie is considered the father of C and Unix, which are arguably the cornerstones of all modern computing. His work forms the foundation of nearly everything on the web, nearly every operating system in existence, and computers as we know them would be unrecognizable without his work. Nothing that Jobs produced would exist without Ritchie and yet almost nobody even knew he existed.
Sir Isaac Newton knew that his accomplishments were only possible because he was able to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ that had come before him. Ritchie was unequivocally the giant which Jobs stood upon that allowed him to reach the levels of success that he did. It is not to say that Jobs was nothing more than a crook who took credit for others’ work. He was a visionary and an unwavering businessman whose mark on the tech world will remain for generations to come, but the next time you take out your iDevice, remember to think of not just Jobs, but Ritchie as well.
