The Deaths of Two Tech Giants

All of you undoubtedly noted the passing of Steve Jobs on October 5.  What you might have missed is the passing of another high technology giant, viz., Dennis Ritchie a few days later.  Ritchie was the father of the C language and one of the main forces behind the development of UNIX®. Indeed, the two accomplishments were closely related—C was created as a “high level” language to be used in the development of UNIX.

At first, the low key coverage of Ritchie’s death, especially when contrasted with the post-mortem lionization of Jobs, annoyed me.  This was, so I thought, just a reflection of the low esteem in which society views “the geeks”—a useful but somewhat laughable group of misfits, who inhabit a stereotype world of bespectacled males sporting pocket protectors.  After all, so I argued to anyone who would listen (not many takers there), C and its derivatives dominate the software world, while UNIX and its derivatives run on everything from computers to climate control systems to automobiles.  Thus, so I saw with what I took at the time to be perfect clarity  that Ritchie was much more significant than Jobs. Take away the creation of the iPad® and things will not be the same, but take away C and UNIX and the high technology world becomes something radically different.

After calming down, I realized that the low key reporting on Ritchie’s passing (especially as opposed to the outpouring of emotion that accompanies Jobs’) was a result of Ritchie’s “children” (and grandchildren many times over)  being in some sense invisible to most people.  Everyone can appreciate the beauty and elegance of an iPad, but unless you are a member of the somewhat exclusive club of people familiar with programming languages, the beauty and elegance of C is not just overlooked, but unfathomable.  Similarly, how many people using an iPad know that the iOS that is powering their machine is a derivative of Ritchie’s UNIX?  Not many, I’d wager.

I later began thinking further about the similarities and differences between Jobs and Ritchie.  Differences are easy to identify— Steve Jobs was, of course, a showman, while Dennis Ritchie was very private—I frankly had not heard anything new about him in years.  There was also the difference between their focus—Jobs was (rightly) all about making profits for Apple and the other companies he headed, while Ritchie worked in a research lab (Bell Labs), which to a large degree gave away its products for free.  I am sure that he made some money on the book on C that he wrote with Brian Kernighan, but that total would likely not make up a few days of what Steve Jobs earned.

Yet there is an underlying similarity to the products with which they have been associated.  Apple’s products under Jobs have been noted for their elegance and, especially with the advent of the iPhone® and iPad, for being platforms on which to run “apps”.  That is, they are essentially sophisticated pieces of infrastructure that serve as the home to add-on pieces of software.

But similar description can be applied to both C and UNIX.  C is a very small and tightly written language, and gains its power though the use of packages that run “on top of” the base language.  Apropos this point: I can still recall being astonished in an introductory programming course when my instructor said that there was no I/O built into C.  Of course there is, I initially thought, wondering (again) about the instructor’s competence. I had been using printf commands like they were going out of style, and aren’t they I/O statements?   Of course, as a  beginning student I had missed the point that printf commands were only available to me when using C because I had included the stdio library in my program.  The C language was “merely” the elegant platform that made libraries like stdio (and the hundreds of other libraries that I later used and created) useful.

The design of UNIX with its small but powerful kernel at its heart with sophisticated libraries and applications running on top of it, lends itself to a similar comparison to products championed by Steve Jobs.  Thus, if one strips away all of the obvious dissimilarities between the two men, a case can be made that they were united in a common design philosophy.

In the end, the world has lost two giants of high technology in a very short period of time. One may argue about the relative importance of each (or importance vis-à-vis each other), but I will just end by saying that both changed our world for the better, and both will be missed.

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