[ShadowAce]

[ctdonath2]

free(DennisRitchie);

[US Navy Vet]

sad_news

[MrEdd]

One of the real innovators that marketers like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have pretended to be part of all these years.

[Steely Tom]

That DEC computer (PDP 10, perhaps?) in this image probably had less memory than the number of pixels in the image itself. It certainly had, at most, one percent or so of the amount of memory in the typical cell phone today, which are much smaller than the paper tape reader on the left side of those ASR33 teletype terminals.

The DEC tape units to the right of Dennis Richie's head each held (if memory serves) about 330K characters, and cost several thousand dollars in mid-1970s money (when a gallon of gas cost 36 cents per gallon or so).

[Steely Tom]

That DEC computer (PDP 10, perhaps?) in this image probably had less memory than the number of pixels in the image itself. It certainly had, at most, one percent or so of the amount of memory in the typical cell phone today, which are much smaller than the paper tape reader on the left side of those ASR33 teletype terminals.

The DEC tape units to the right of Dennis Richie's head each held (if memory serves) about 330K characters, and cost several thousand dollars in mid-1970s money (when a gallon of gas cost 36 cents per gallon or so).

[AnotherUnixGeek]

The computing world wouldn't be what it is today without Dennis Ritchie.

You can see the influence of C in the language conventions of the major programming languages in use today - C++, Java, C#, Objective-C, Perl.

As for Unix - it's the basis of the modern computer operating system. Linux (obviously), Mac OS X (obviously), and even Windows NT and it's descendants like Windows 7 - here's Bill Gates' acknowledgment:

"And through Windows NT, you can see it throughout the design. In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix. There are so many of the design decisions that have been influenced by that environment. And that’s no accident. I mean, we knew that Unix operability would be very important and we knew that the largest body of programmers that we’d want to draw on in building Windows NT applications would certainly come from the Unix base."

And remember, Ritchie kept his opening curly brace to the right of the function declaration, not below it. If it was good enough for K&R, it's good enough for us =).

[GOPJ]

We lost another great one... prayers for the family and loved ones...

[billphx]

Thanks for posting this, I had not heard