SAQ wrote:
FWIW Ritchie did get a brief 2.5" or so of column space and a picture on pg. 2 of the Seattle Times. What did others see in their papers?
The SeattleTimes article:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/b ... tchie.html
SAN FRANCISCO —
Dennis Ritchie, a pioneer in computer programming, has died at age 70, according to his longtime employer.
Ritchie created the popular C programming language and helped create the Unix operating software. He died a month after his birthday, according to his biography on a webpage of Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs. Ritchie joined Bell Labs in the late 1960s.
The company confirmed his death to The Associated Press but would not disclose the cause of death or when Ritchie died. A spokeswoman said the company was trying to contact his family.
Ritchie is best known for his contributions to computer programming and software. The C programming language, which Ritchie developed in the early 1970's, is still popular. It has gone through a number of upgrades, and it is commonly used for website development and other computer tasks. The Unix operating software also surged in popularity. It and its offshoots, including the open-source Linux, are widely used today, in corporate servers and even cellphones.
Ritchie's biography on the Bell Labs site says that he was born on Sept. 9, 1941 in Bronxville, N.Y., and studied physics and math at Harvard University.
"My undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat," Ritchie wrote. "My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural languages better than functional ones."
Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs, wrote in a blog post Thursday that Ritchie was "truly an inspiration to all of us, not just for his many accomplishments, but because of who he was as a friend, an inventor, and a humble and gracious man."
A small regional Murdoch paper in Australia in a city of barely a couple of million people,
http://www.couriermail.com.au/ipad/obit ... 6174426413
and thus, in the obituary pages it was wrote:
COMPUTER scientist Dennis Ritchie was born in 1941 in New York City and died in 2011 in New Jersey.
Although not a household name like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, Dennis Ritchie (known to his friends simply as "dmr" his computer user name) was one of the small band of visionaries who between them created the digital revolution.
He was the brains behind both the C programming language and the co-developer of the ubiquitous UNIX operating system, inventions which helped usher in the internet and smart phones to name but a few of the applications which have emerged from their ideas.
The development of Unix was such a milestone, in fact, that it won him a Turing Award in 1983 (the computing world's equivalent of a Nobel prize).
Born in New York in 1941, he was one of the baby boomer cohort which came of age as personal computing took off.
And like many of them, his emergence had as much to do with good genes as it did with good timing. His father Alistair was a leading researcher at Bell Labs where Dennis Ritchie was later to begin his brilliant career.
By the time he joined Bell in 1967, after graduating from Harvard University in physics, it had launched a landmark project called "Multics" with General Electric and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It was billed as the world's most ambitious computing project and allowed several hundred users to work on the same mainframe computer at the same time a laughably small system these days, but back then unheard of.
Bell was responsible for the operating software and Mr Ritchie was thrown into the deep end, given the task of trying to sort out the crisis the project was in at the time.
After four years of gruelling and expensive work, Bell gave up. Ritchie and another lead programmer on Multics, Ken Thompson, did not.
Realising that they needed to design a much simpler system, over a couple of months in 1969 they came up with what they called Unix.
After scrounging obsolete mainframes to test it on, within three years they had a working prototype up and running.
They also talked Bell into trying it on one of tis big mainframes and rewrote the operating system for this new machine in a language Ritchie co-invented, which he called C. It bridged the gap between machine code and programming languages.
Because Bell Labs' parent, AT&T, was a regulated telephone monopoly, it was not allowed to compete with the then still fledgling US computer industry and so the altruistic Ritchie decided to distribute Unix for free to universities and research institutions.
It became a hit and developed a cult-like following, particularly after Bill Gates developed his own all-conquering operating system.
One of Unix's legion of fans was none other than former Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, who used it as the basis for his NeXT workstation when he was forced out of Apple in the mid-1980s and later for all of Apple's products including iphones when he re-joined the company.
Ironically, after the US government deregulated the telecommunications industry, AT&T tried to close down free usage of Unix.
This generated a now-famous backlash from Unix's fan base and following the efforts of a MIT hacker in 1983 hundreds of amateur programmers came up with their own version which came to be known as Linux.
Despite never achieving any great public fame for his profound breakthroughs (his death, one week after that of Steve Jobs, went almost unremarked in the mainstream media), Mr Ritchie nevertheless was showered with awards.
Among them were the prestigious Japan Prize, a fellowship of the US National Academy of Engineering and the National Medal of Technology which was personally presented to him in 1999 by then president Bill Clinton.
Mr Ritchie had been in poor health for several years after battling both prostate cancer and heart disease.
Mr Ritchie is survived by two brothers and a sister.
The San Francisco Chronicle has two articles, neither of which match the Murdoch paper article exactly. Normally Australian papers just take what is on the wires (Reuters or whatever) and reprint it...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/tec ... y_id=99607
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 1LHD7C.DTL
The communist party Pravda,
I mean Sydney Morning Herald... has nothing, nada, zip on Dennis Ritchie...
It wasn't about
the glorious unions crippling the national airline (so the twice unelected somewhere to the left of Karl Marx minority government can nationalize it, comrade) or whitewashing union bosses now members of a extremely socialist federal (and feral) government running up hundreds of thousands of dollars on prostitutes on union credit cards....
so it never happened.
The Murdoch papers are becoming subscription based so the unwashed masses will remain ignorant commie unwashed masses in this country.
R.
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