Dennis M. Ritchie passed away yesterday. Ritchie was the creator of the C programming language and the co-creator of the Unix operating system (together with Ken Thompson) starting in the late 60s and early 70s. Both C and Unix have provided the underpinnings for many of the systems we still use today all the way up to iOS.
I find it impossible not to think about the pronounced differences between Ritchie’s and Jobs’ contributions to the history of computing. Especially because in my personal case the two almost literally collided with each other.
I didn’t really encounter C and Unix until I got to college. Before then, most of the programming I had done had been in assembly, Pascal and Lisp. But once there, Kernighan and Ritchie’s “The C Programming Language” became a constant companion. My first really big project in C was writing a Lisp interpreter. This started out as a class assignment, but I got so excited that I built out all the features of Franz Lisp.
And here is the source of my Jobs-Ritchie collision: I was using Think C on a Macintosh. Think C was an implementation of C created by Think Technologies (later acquired by Symantec). One of the reasons it was possible to create Think C is because neither Ritchie nor AT&T (his employer) chose to get a lot of software patents at the time. In fact, I searched the USPTO database and couldn’t find Dennis Ritchie on any patents, but I suspect that I may have done the search wrong. In my post on Jobs I already wrote last week about how much Apple came to stand for the opposite philosophy.
Two great links to look at are this tribute by Herb Sutter and maybe even better Dennis Ritchie’s own web page at Bell Labs.
P.S. I discovered yesterday that many moves later I no longer have my copy of K&R. Bummer since it had a lot of marginalia in it. I just went ahead and ordered another copy from Alibris.
