Another one of the important figures in the world of Computing has passed away. Dennis Ritchie was the creator of C programing language and along with Ken Thompson, was instrumental in rewriting the Unix OS in C in 1973. They were at Bell labs and were one of the pioneers in Multitasking, Multiuser, Multiplatform Computing. The trio of Brian Kernighan, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie is permanently linked to the world of computing as we know today. All the major OSes of today - Linux, OSX, Solaris, AIX, even Windows have their origins in the design and architecture in Unix and C. Unix provided the fundamental concepts of ACLs, Filesystem hierarchy, Process scheduling, Memory management and Threads that all of these OS'es borrow. And C of course is the language that these concepts are brought to reality in the form of programs that these OSes use as the foundation. True that in the world of IT today dominated by Business Tycoons and CEOs, its very difficult to notice and recognize the importance of REAL computer scientists who were instrumental in making the Technology a thing of everyday life. Their contribution to the Human Evolution and Knowledge sharing is immense and permanent. They are the real visionaries who actually changed the world and the world as we know today would be very different if it was not for them to come and change the landscape with their vision, hardwork and inventions...
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