The passing of a legend

(Please bear with me as to the tardiness of this post.  I know it's about 2 months late in the coming, but I've been busy.)

October, 2011 saw the loss of one of the most important and influential computer minds of this generation.

I'm not talking about Steve Jobs.  Whoooooooooah, no.

I will concede that he had a major influence in the computer world, but let's face hard reality.  Apple Computer, Co. was instrumental in bringing the PC to the masses, thanks to the Woz and his engineering genius.  Steve Jobs, on the other hand, was a salesman, a go-getter, effectively the face of Apple, but not the mind.  Woz was lacking in the inter-personnel department; the reclusive, creative Ying to Job's Yang.  However, the reality is Jobs brought nothing to the table technologically.  He had the business mind and charisma to brand and market.

What this means is, and I hate to break this to you, but Steve Jobs didn't invent the iPod.  He was the whip cracker over a group of extremely intelligent group of people.  The people who actually did the work.

No, the person I'm referring to is Dennis Ritchie.  The creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system.  Without his contributions, you wouldn't have Mac OS X and your shiny new iPad would look a lot different.

Dennis Ritchie, or dmr, was found in his residence a week after Steve Jobs died.  Of course, most of the sobbing, the accolades and the fanfare went to Jobs, leaving Ritchie's passing rather obscured.  Few outside the technological field even knew his name, yet his work has impacted every person who has ever touched an electronic device.  And I mean that quite literally.  The same cannot be said of Steve Jobs.

This, of course, is typical.  Its the loudest, most conspicuous people that get the attention, while often the real innovators stand back from the limelight, preferring to do the work so that the loud ones can continue in their ostentatious ways.

Case in point...how many people would actually get a reply from Steve Jobs if they had sent him an email?  Yet, dmr frequently responded to questions or requests for clarification regarding Unix questions.

So, for anyone who has ever laughed uncontrollably from this unintentionally hilarious scene, let's remember the nerds, the people who actually contributed to the computing world.  Not just the ones who sold it.