Computers OverClocked

[Hero_Lief]

Until his untimely death, his pioneering innovations revolutionised the world of computing.
Source: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/underappreciated-computer-whiz-left-enduring-legacy-20111024-1mg9i.html

Small, elegant, and yet incredibly powerful, his work has burrowed its way deep into every area of modern life. His legacy lives on in desktop computers, iDevices, and even Android phones.

I am, of course, referring to Dennis Ritchie, who recently died aged 70. If you're not a computer nerd then around about now, you're probably saying to yourself ''Dennis who? Surely you mean Steve Jobs.'' No, I don't, since it was Dennis Ritchie who invented the C programming language.

Still underwhelmed?

C is to computer languages what Latin is to European languages. Although developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Ritchie was employed by AT&T Bell labs in the US, the language - and its various extensions - remains one of the most used computer languages in the world. For example, Objective-C, the language that's used to create apps for the Apple Mac and is used to create many of the apps found on iPods, iPhones and iPads is an extension of the C language.

And then there's C++, yet another extension of the C language. Microsoft Windows, the operating system used to run most of the world's desktop computers is, according to Microsoft written in a combination of C, C++ and another language C#. Similarly, the Android operating system that runs on many non-''i'' phones is written in a language called Java, which owes much to C's syntax and structure.

Ritchie's innovations don't end with devising a small, powerful and incredibly popular computer language. He also contributed to the Unix operating system, which is the basis for the operating system that runs Apple's desktop computers as well as the freely available operating system Linux.

If it weren't for Ritchie, Apple's - and many other company's - innovations might never have been. One Twitter user summed up the relationship between Ritchie and Apple's co-founder in the following way: ''Dennis Ritchie was the engineer/architect who's [sic] chapel ceiling Steve Jobs painted.''

The response to the passing of the two men, though, couldn't have been more different. A search of Australian news sources turned up only a handful of mentions of Ritchie's life and work. Many of these were specialist IT publications.

By contrast, there was almost blanket coverage of Steve Jobs's death, much of it containing more hype than an Apple product launch. If the obituaries for Jobs were anything to go by, you could be forgiven for thinking that only one man worked at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California.

The ABC's Lateline program, for example, told us that Jobs redefined animation with Pixar studios. Apparently the artists, animators, writers and Pixar's army of engineers were little more than automatons, working to Jobs's direction. In the same report, futurist Mark Pesce was quoted as saying: ''There's no other person in the history of computing that has had such a big impact on computing. If that doesn't justify a cult, then I'm not sure what does.''

The impression given is that Jobs single-handedly designed all of Apple's products, wrote all the code for the software, built all the devices by hand, while finding the time to pen and shoot a few blockbuster movies.

Such overstatement does an injustice to Jobs. Jobs's boosters in the media make the man look like a devotee of the Kim Jong-il School of CV Building, providing lists of his feats in engineering and the sciences, the visual and performing arts, along with his exploits in the business world - wrapped in an infantile personality cult.

In the process, Jobs is becoming a cartoon character: the all-knowing, all-seeing genius supergeek complete with nerdy skivvy and spectacles. More, it perpetuates the pernicious notion that genius is an individual trait when genius is never an individual quality. It is a product of the human species' capacity for collaboration and co-operation - and the accident of being born into a nurturing, well-resourced environment like, say, Silicon Valley in the 1950s and '60s.

That applies to the genius of Steven Paul Jobs as much as it does to the genius of Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie.

Certainly there are individuals possessed of great foresight and insight. But as the largely unremarked-upon passing of Dennis Ritchie ought to remind us, even Steve Jobs needed to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/underappreciated-computer-whiz-left-enduring-legacy-20111024-1mg9i.html#ixzz1bn9YBkA5

[Hero_Lief]

Until his untimely death, his pioneering innovations revolutionised the world of computing.
Source: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/underappreciated-computer-whiz-left-enduring-legacy-20111024-1mg9i.html

Small, elegant, and yet incredibly powerful, his work has burrowed its way deep into every area of modern life. His legacy lives on in desktop computers, iDevices, and even Android phones.

I am, of course, referring to Dennis Ritchie, who recently died aged 70. If you're not a computer nerd then around about now, you're probably saying to yourself ''Dennis who? Surely you mean Steve Jobs.'' No, I don't, since it was Dennis Ritchie who invented the C programming language.

Still underwhelmed?

C is to computer languages what Latin is to European languages. Although developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Ritchie was employed by AT&T Bell labs in the US, the language - and its various extensions - remains one of the most used computer languages in the world. For example, Objective-C, the language that's used to create apps for the Apple Mac and is used to create many of the apps found on iPods, iPhones and iPads is an extension of the C language.

And then there's C++, yet another extension of the C language. Microsoft Windows, the operating system used to run most of the world's desktop computers is, according to Microsoft written in a combination of C, C++ and another language C#. Similarly, the Android operating system that runs on many non-''i'' phones is written in a language called Java, which owes much to C's syntax and structure.

Ritchie's innovations don't end with devising a small, powerful and incredibly popular computer language. He also contributed to the Unix operating system, which is the basis for the operating system that runs Apple's desktop computers as well as the freely available operating system Linux.

If it weren't for Ritchie, Apple's - and many other company's - innovations might never have been. One Twitter user summed up the relationship between Ritchie and Apple's co-founder in the following way: ''Dennis Ritchie was the engineer/architect who's [sic] chapel ceiling Steve Jobs painted.''

The response to the passing of the two men, though, couldn't have been more different. A search of Australian news sources turned up only a handful of mentions of Ritchie's life and work. Many of these were specialist IT publications.

By contrast, there was almost blanket coverage of Steve Jobs's death, much of it containing more hype than an Apple product launch. If the obituaries for Jobs were anything to go by, you could be forgiven for thinking that only one man worked at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California.

The ABC's Lateline program, for example, told us that Jobs redefined animation with Pixar studios. Apparently the artists, animators, writers and Pixar's army of engineers were little more than automatons, working to Jobs's direction. In the same report, futurist Mark Pesce was quoted as saying: ''There's no other person in the history of computing that has had such a big impact on computing. If that doesn't justify a cult, then I'm not sure what does.''

The impression given is that Jobs single-handedly designed all of Apple's products, wrote all the code for the software, built all the devices by hand, while finding the time to pen and shoot a few blockbuster movies.

Such overstatement does an injustice to Jobs. Jobs's boosters in the media make the man look like a devotee of the Kim Jong-il School of CV Building, providing lists of his feats in engineering and the sciences, the visual and performing arts, along with his exploits in the business world - wrapped in an infantile personality cult.

In the process, Jobs is becoming a cartoon character: the all-knowing, all-seeing genius supergeek complete with nerdy skivvy and spectacles. More, it perpetuates the pernicious notion that genius is an individual trait when genius is never an individual quality. It is a product of the human species' capacity for collaboration and co-operation - and the accident of being born into a nurturing, well-resourced environment like, say, Silicon Valley in the 1950s and '60s.

That applies to the genius of Steven Paul Jobs as much as it does to the genius of Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie.

Certainly there are individuals possessed of great foresight and insight. But as the largely unremarked-upon passing of Dennis Ritchie ought to remind us, even Steve Jobs needed to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/underappreciated-computer-whiz-left-enduring-legacy-20111024-1mg9i.html#ixzz1bn9YBkA5

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[yiyad123]

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[maomao12]

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