Loud and Quiet

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This is for the quiet ones.

Steve Jobs died on October 5th of 2011 at the age of 56. Following that there was a constant outpouring of tributes, news stories, blogs and "sympathy consumerism" which (bizarrely) has not helped Apple's sagging sales.

But what about the death of Dennis Ritchie?

Before you guess this is that kind of article, I'm not going to spring one of those "while we mourn the rich the innocent are dying" jags on you. I try not to be trite. Consider this much more of an apples to Apples comparison.

First of all, did you have to Google or Wiki "Dennis Ritchie" to know who I was talking about? Did you even bother?

Oddly enough, Dennis Ritchie died just one week after Jobs on October 12th. He was 70 years old, and appears to have died simply from declining health in his later years. It actually took some news agencies a couple of days to even make mention of his death. Some never mentioned it at all.

The reason this is significant is because Ritchie is the inventor of the Unix and C programming languages, and a pioneer in Switching Circuit Theory.

Let me translate that for the average person. If you have ever used the Internet, you have been using Unix based technology. If you are one of the millions of people that uses Firefox, Open Office, or just about any Android or Google software, that has it's basis in Unix technology. If you have ever played a video game, there's a halfway decent chance it was at some point connected to a C based compiler. If you have ever put a dollar bill in a vending machine, or turned on a home security system then there's a good chance that it's also worked around a C based language. That "Switching Circuit Theory" is something you've used if you have ever made a phone call, no maybes about that. And if you have ever used any Apple product ever, the whole language and OS system was built up around the contributions of Dennis Ritchie. Jobs and Wozniak would never have been able to build the first Apple computer or program subsequent models without Unix.

I'm not sure how I felt when I heard Ritchie died. Humble, for one thing. This man was a giant of technology, yet he passed without fanfare in the home where he lived alone. I feel disappointment, too. Just try a search of "Steve Jobs Death" and it turned up more than 300 million hits and the same search for Ritchie yielded just over 1 million. And I feel frustration at the fact that on October 15th I could have gone outside and said to any passing stranger that it was a shame about Dennis Ritchie and I would've gotten a blank stare.

If there's a lesson here at all it's that heroes aren't always obvious. Some are very quiet, even though they are more deserving of worship. So this is just a sort of homage to that sort of hero. If you want, do a favor for me. And also for yourself. Find one of those quiet heroes and thank them while they're still alive.
© 2011 - 2024 B9CC1D
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LevyNagy's avatar
Indeed. Or should we say re-evaluate the humanity as a whole? It would be easier to do it all with a quick restart than to change back the meanings of every concept used by man.