Ritchie, Jobs and hyperbole

It’s a shame that Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs died at around the same time. I don’t say this out of a belief that the news about the latter somehow eclipsed the former; indeed I’ve seen a number of mainstream obits and no shortage of blog and Usenet traffic about the DMR.

( Rather, the reason is the claim that Jobs would have been nothing without DMR. )

In summary while DMR’s work has found its way into important roles in Apple’s products (among others), so has that of many other creators, and his contribution was probably not indispensable. This isn’t to underestimate the importance either of C as a portable language suitable for low level tasks; nor of Unix as a portable operating system and, in the long run more importantly, as an operating system interface supporting many implementations.