Posted on 10/17/2011 7:21:53 AM PDT by fremont_steve
In the last two weeks, we have lost two people who had immense influence on our industry.
It is undeniable that Steve Jobs brought us innovation and iconic products like the world had never seen, as well as a cult following of consumers and end users that mythicized him.
The likes of which will probably be never seen again.
I too, like many in this industry, despite my documented differences with the man and his company, paid my respects, and have acknowledged his influence.
But the “magical” products that Apple and Steve Jobs — as well as many other companies created owe just about everything we know and write about in modern computing as it exists today to Dennis Ritchie, who passed away this week at the age of 70.
Dennis Ritchie!
(Excerpt) Read more at zdnet.com ...
Dennis Ritchie was also a crook on the lamb in Europe that was given a pass by Clinton after Mrs. Ritchie dumped a ton of cash into the Democrat election machine. Not someone I would want my children to emulate.
While Hughes may have been hands on in the beginning, it likely became more of a delegating role once WWII began. Certainly after it ended and the jet age and space race began.
Pascal was indeed the programming environment of choice for the original Mac but I also programmed them in C and FORTRAN as well. Even did a little programming on the short lived Lisa back in the day.
Alan Kay at Xerox PARC Place was the inspiration for the original Lisa and Mac
Apple didn't just "have people trying to port Unix to the Mac" -- it had A/UX, a full Unix implementation, from 1988 to 1995. Meanwhile, Jobs wasn't at Apple, but at NeXT, building another Unix-based OS.
IMAC - style points... and ONLY style points - who knew people wanted to by Blueberry colored computers?
What you dismiss as "style" is intelligent industrial design. Who knew people wanted a compact all-in-one computer, with a dizzying array of legacy ports replaced by USB? Who knew people wanted to plug in three cables, press the power button, and be online in ten minutes? The fact that people didn't want an ugly beige box under the desk was just a bonus.
iPod - re-invention of the Diamond RIO - stylishly... again style points with a better user interface that was a market success. He didn’t invent the MP3 player - he improved it...
So the difference between about 20 songs and about 1,000 is "style"? MP3 players before the iPod were basically a Sony Discman with memory cards replacing CDs. The iPod took it from a geek novelty to a compelling product -- your whole music collection (if only a pretty small one at first) in your pocket.
That's what other tech companies haven't seen until Apple has shown it to them, and what you're dismissing as "style." Apple makes products for people, not systems for end users, and that's a very real value proposition that doesn't appear on a spec sheet.
There were other visionaries around at the same time, but the visions of Ritchie and Jobs were "correct," meaning they were the right thing at the right time.
Ritchie did an extremely good job of looking at the other programming languages of his time, drilling down deep to figure out what was wrong about them and what was right about them, and then keeping the best parts of what worked while addressing their shortcomings and fixing what didn't work. In my opinion, C is a very good language, although not hugely better than others that were around in those days (I'm thinking of Pascal, but others will differ on that). The great value of C, as far as I'm concerned, is that it led to C++, which represents a true paradigm-shift for the art of computer programming. As many of you know, C++ was not the first object-oriented language, but it is (again in my opinion) the most accessable.
Jobs, on the other hand, visualized what a small computer could be, and saw a path to the realization of that vision. He had help, of course. Many have talked about his two-day visit to Xerox PARC, at which he was introduced to the GUI and the concepts that surround it, as well as the Ethernet. Jobs didn't figure out those ideas, it's true. He did, however, figure out how to bring them to market in a way that would make money, and he did it first, before Microsoft. If the great minds at Xerox could have done that, the Mac freaks would be Lisa freaks, and many other things in our world today would have different names.
Both were techies, and both were engineers. One was self-taught, and the other went "the high road" through some of the best academic experiences one can have.
Both were driven by a desire to pursue a vision to the end, and, because they were first to market, will be remembered for a long time.
I think you’re confusing Dennis Ritchie with Mark Rich.
You greatly overestimate how hands-on Edison was. Edison't lab in West Orange had a lot of engineers, only one of whom was the inventor of record for anything that came out of it. If anything, Steve Jobs was far more generous in sharing credit with his team than was the "Wizard of Menlo Park."
Oops.
You greatly overestimate how hands-on Edison was. Edison't lab in West Orange had a lot of engineers, only one of whom was the inventor of record for anything that came out of it. If anything, Steve Jobs was far more generous in sharing credit with his team than was the "Wizard of Menlo Park."Further - the REAL point of the article is that people HAVE been comparing him to the likes of Edison. He wasn’t Edison. Heck - neither was Ritchie. Edison was the the end-all - he was both the technologist AND the Visionary.
Hear, hear!!No one can seriously argue that Edison wasn't a technologist - he got his start by clearing up a lash-up in a ticker tape system - but the big thing about Edison was that he founded and got financing for little companies like General Electric to make light bulbs you could buy in stores, and Edison Electric Light Company (now Consolidated Edison) - to generate electric power and run it down wires into your home so you could flip a switch and be able to see after dark without much risk of burning your house down.IOW, if you just invent something, and don't do the follow-through to produce and distribute it, you are no Edison! Edison didn't discover electricity, he created a lab in which to try thousands of things that didn't work before he got a working electric light bulb design. Steve Jobs didn't invent the microchip, or even the personal computer, and he didn't invent the GUI. He did direct the development of the Mac from those existing things. And (as Jobs himself stated), Windows was a copy of the Mac, years behind it.
Isn't the fact that both died in the same month the reason for comparisons being drawn between Ritchie and Jobs? Shouldn't Bill Gates be more directly in the mix? After all, Gates founded a software company, and Ritchie was a (perhaps the premiere) software guy. The comparison between Jobs and Gates has always been obvious - but what did Jobs copy from Gates? Obviously if Gates and Ritchie were in the same organization, Gates wouldn't have been working for Ritchie. Nor would Jobs.
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