'Father of Unix' Dennis Ritchie dies at 70

While the world mourned the death of Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs earlier this month, few noticed the death of another computer visionary who had a much bigger impact on the computer industry: Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie is the father of the C programming language that he and fellow Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson used to build UNIX —the operating system that is the foundation of newer OSes, including Apple's Mac OS X and iOS. "Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on — is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they’re not, they’re written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C," said programming legend and now Google principal engineer Rob Pike, in an interview with Wired.com. He noted even Microsoft's Windows was written in C. The New York Times reported Ritchie died October 12 after a prolonged illness at age 70. It quoted Ritchie's brother Bill as saying Ritchie, who lived alone, was in frail health in recent years after treatment for prostate cancer and heart disease. "It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did," Pike said. Comparing Jobs to Ritchie, Pike said that while Jobs was "king of the visible," Ritchie was "king of what is largely invisible." "Jobs’ genius is that he builds these products that people really like to use because he has taste and can build things that people really find compelling. Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don’t necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday," he said. — TJD, GMA News