What Can We Learn From Dennis Ritchie?

As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie's importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it's valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already populated by Lovelace, Turing, and (although this crowing will be controversial, at least until history has its say) the recently-departed Steve Jobs. UNIX was one of the first multi-user operating systems, allowing scientists and researchers to share computer time on what were traditionally batch-based machines. The concept of multi-user and multitasking were of great interest to researchers simply because of the time required to write, run, and receive the output of batch programs. Computer time, in batch mode, was expensive, as this anecdote illustrates:

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/aWEuaKPYUg4/

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