Joon’s Tech Corner: Remembering the man who made your computer run

March 26, 2012

News

I remember the exact moment I found out that Steve Jobs had passed away. It was in The Sagamore room and I was looking over some layout that we were working on. Suddenly, someone burst in and yelled “Joon! Steve Jobs is dead” (You know who you are).

Of course, that news was the headline everywhere for weeks to come, but in fact, there was somebody else who died in October, 2011 who contributed much more to technology than Jobs did. That person was Dennis Ritchie.

Ritchie was the creator of Unix and the C programming language, the basis of Unix. which is now the basis of nearly everything related to technology. Your PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, you name it, it runs on Unix.

Don’t worry, I also had no clue who Ritchie was until I had a conversation with our very own interim headmaster John Ritchie, who’s his brother.

“We were a really close family,” said John Ritchie. “Dennis was always so brilliant. Before he created Unix, he would always be down in the basement. We didn’t know what he was doing, and I don’t think we realized how big his contribution was until he passed.”

Let’s put into perspective the magnitude of Ritchie in technology. He is the Michael Jordan of programmers; what he managed to accomplish towered over all the others.

Especially in today’s fast paced news cycle, why wasn’t the creator of Unix’s passing a bigger news story? For obvious reasons. It was overshadowed by Steve Jobs’s death. But more importantly, according to John Ritchie, it was just in Dennis’s personality to be humble.

“He was always low-key. If you talked to him, you would’ve never known he was famous or had done anything significant.” said Ritchie. “I remember at his funeral people would talk about all these great stories about him.”

Without Ritchie, that computer you are using to read this wouldn’t be running Windows or Mac OSX, the Facebook tab that keeps pinging wouldn’t be a distraction, and you wouldn’t have a place to make really stupid hashtags.

Ritchie probably didn’t get the attention that he probably deserved considering that his touch is on every single piece of technology today, but maybe that is the way he wanted it to be.