Linus Torvalds once said, in reference to the development of Linux, that he “had hoisted [himself] up on the shoulders of giants.” Among those giants, Dennis Ritchie (aka dmr) was likely the tallest. Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system passed away on October 8 at the age of 70, leaving a legacy that casts a very long shadow.
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By creating C, Ritchie gave birth to the concept of open systems. C was developed so they could port Unix to any computer, and so that programs written on one platform (and the skills used to develop them) could be easily transferred to another.
In that way, Ritchie has shaped our world in much more fundamental ways than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates have. What sets him apart from them is that he did it all not in a quest for wealth or fame, but just out of intellectual curiosity. Unix and C were the product of pure research—research that started as a side-project using equipment bought based on a promise that Ritchie and Thompson would develop a word processor.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/20 ... s-ritchie/
That shiny iOS, OSX, Windows OS, etc device can be directly linked back to this man's creation of the C programming language and UNIX OS.
