Dennis Ritchie

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. Ritchie is currently the head of Lucent Technologies‘ System Software Research Department.

Background

Born in Bronxville, New York, Ritchie graduated from Harvard with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs’ Computing Sciences Research Center.

C and Unix

Ritchie is best known as the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, and as co-author of the definitive book on C, The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as ‘K/R’ or K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie).

Ritchie’s invention of C and his role in the development of Unix alongside Ken Thompson, has placed him as an important pioneer of modern computing. The C language is still widely used today in application and operating system development and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. Unix has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now well-established precepts of computing. The popular Linux operating system and its tools are descendants of Ritchie’s work and the Windows operating systems include Unix compatibility tools and C compilers for developers.

Ritchie has said that creating the C language ‘looked like a good thing to do’ and that anyone else in the same place at the same time would have done the same thing, though Bell Labs colleague Bjarne Stroustrup, developer of C++ said that ‘if Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn’.

Following the success of Unix, Ritchie continued research into operating systems and programming languages with contributions to the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems and the Limbo programming language.

Ken Thompson

Biography

Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as Ken Thompson (or simply Ken in hacker circles), is an American pioneer of computer science notable for his work with the B programming language and his shepherding the UNIX and Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating systems.

Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and Master’s degree in 1966, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his Master’s thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp.

In the 1960s, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on the Multics operating system. While writing Multics, Thompson created the Bon programming language. The two left the Multics project as it was becoming too complex, but they took the lessons they learned to Bell Labs, where, in 1969, Thompson and Ritchie were the principal creators of the UNIX operating system. There, Thompson also wrote the B programming language, a precursor to Ritchie’s C.

Thompson had developed the CTSS version of the editor QED, which included regular expressions for searching text. QED and Thompson’s later editor ed (the default editor on Unix) contributed greatly to the eventual popularity of regular expressions, previously regarded mostly as a tool (or toy) for logicians. Regular expressions became pervasive in Unix text processing programs (such as grep), and even more modern programming languages like Perl. Almost all programs that work with regular expressions today use some variant of Thompson’s notation for them.

Along with Joseph Condon, he created the hardware and software for Belle, a chess computer. He also wrote programs for generating the complete enumeration of chess endings, for all 4, 5, and 6-piece endings, allowing chess-playing computer programs to make “perfect” moves once a position stored in them is reached. Later, with the help of chess endgame expert John Roycroft, Thompson distributed his first results on CD-ROM.

Thompson’s style of programming has influenced others, notably in the terseness of his expressions and a preference for clear statements.

In late 2000, Thompson retired from Bell Labs. He worked at Entrisphere, Inc as a fellow until 2006, and now works at Google as a Distinguished Engineer.

Steven Wozniak

Stephen Wozniak grew up in suburban Santa Clara Valley, California (the area now known as Silicon Valley), where his father was an engineer for Lockheed and his mother the president of a Republican women’s club. Already Santa Clara Valley was a technological center, its growth accelerating in the wake of Sputnik, the first satellite to be put in orbit, by the Soviet Union.

Wozniak was into electronics even as a kid. He made many homemade devices from kits and from scratch, including a voltmeter, ham radio, calculator, and games. He was extremely bright, but school bored him. He went to the University of Colorado and flunked out.Wozniak went back to school at the University of California in 1971, but dropped out and returned to Hewlett-Packard. Back at home he met Steve Jobs through a mutual friend. Jobs was another computer hobbyist, bored by school but obsessed by electronics.

In the early 1970s Silicon Valley was teeming with computer hobbyists and video game lovers. Wozniak and Jobs both belonged to the Homebrew Computer Club, one of many users’ groups that sprung up in the mid 1970s when personal computers where just taking off. This boom in personal computers owed its existence to the development of the microprocessor in 1970. In 1975 the first personal computer kit, the Altair 8800, was announced. Orders for it poured in, though the computer couldn’t do very much once it was assembled.

In 1976 Wozniak couldn’t afford an Altair. So he built his own computer, using a cheaper microprocessor and adding several memory chips. As a circuit board alone, it could do more than the Altair. He and Jobs called it Apple I, and Jobs took on the task of marketing it while Wozniak continued to improve it. By 1977, Wozniak had built Apple II and quit his day job. Wozniak and Jobs formed Apple Computer, Inc. When it went public in 1980, its stock value was $117 million; three years later it was $985 million.

Though Wozniak became very rich, he remained mainly interested in the technical aspects of the business. In 1981 a plane he was piloting crashed on the runway. He suffered injuries and amnesia, and his recovery lasted two years. In that time he became involved in other ventures, sponsoring concerts and pursuing New Age interests. He returned to Apple in 1983, but retired in 1985 after he and Jobs received the National Technology Award from President Reagan.

He started other businesses and became involved with protecting First Amendment rights in the computer field. He moved to Los Gatos, California with his third wife and six children. After retiring from Apple, he returned to Berkeley and earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

“It was like a revolution that I’d never seen. You read about technological revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, and here was one of those sort of things happening and I was part of it.”

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs innovative idea of a personal computer led him into revolutionising the computer hardware and software industry. When Jobs was twenty one, he and a friend, Wozniak, built a personal computer called the Apple. The Apple changed people’s idea of a computer from a gigantic and inscrutable mass of vacuum tubes only used by big business and the government to a small box used by ordinary people. No company has done more to democratize the computer and make it user-friendly than Apple Computer Inc. Jobs software research for the Macintosh introduced windows interface and mouse technology which set a standard for all applications interface in software.

Two years after building the Apple I, Jobs introduced the Apple II. The Apple II was the best buy in personal computers for home and small business throughout the following five years. When the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, it was marketed towards medium and large businesses. The Macintosh took the first major step in adapting the personal computer to the needs of the corporate work force. Workers lacking computer knowledge accomplished daily office activities through the Macintosh’s user-friendly windows interface. Steve Jobs was considered a brilliant young man in Silicon Valley, because he saw the future demands of the computer industry. He was able to build a personal computer and market the product. “The personal computer was created by the hardware revolution of the 1970’s and the next dramatic change will come from a software revolution,” said Jobs. His innovative ideas of user-friendly software for the Macintosh changed the design and functionality of software interfaces created for computers. The Macintosh’s interface allowed people to interact easier with computers, because they used a mouse to click on objects displayed on the screen to perform some function. The Macintosh got rid of the computer command lines that intemidated people from using computers. After resigning from Apple Inc., Jobs would continue challenging himself to develop computers and software for education and research by starting a new company that would eventually develop the NextStep computer.

Early History.
Steven Paul, was an orphan adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California in February 1955. Jobs was not happy at school in Mountain View so the family moved to Los Altos, California, where Steven attended Homestead High School. His electronics teacher at Homestead High, Hohn McCollum, recalled he was “something of a loner” and “always had a different way of looking at things.”

After school, Jobs attended lectures at the Hewlett-Packard electronics firm in Palo Alto, California. There he was hired as a summer employee. Another employee at Hewlett-Packard was Stephen Wozniak a recent dropout from the University of California at Berkeley. An engineering whiz with a passion for inventing electronic gadgets, Wozniak at that time was perfecting his “blue box,” an illegal pocket-size telephone attachment that would allow the user to make free long-distance calls. Jobs helped Wozniak sell a number of the devices to customers.

In 1972 Jobs graduated from high school and register at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. After dropping out of Reed after one semester, he hung around campus for a year, taking classes in philosophy and immersing himself in the counterculture

Early in 1974 Jobs took a job as a video game designer at Atari, Inc., a pioneer in electronic arcade recreation. After several months working, he saved enough money to adventure on a trip to India where he travelled in search of spiritual enlightenment in the company of Dan Kottke, a friend from Reed College. In autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of Wozniak’s “Homebrew Computer Club.” Wozniak, like most of the club’s members, was content with the joy of electronics creation. Jobs was not interested in creating electronics and was nowhere near as good an engineer as Woz. He had his eye on marketability of electronic products and persuaded Wozniak to work with him toward building a personal computer.

Wozniak and Jobs designed the Apple I computer in Jobs’s bedroom and they built the prototype in the Jobs’ garage. Jobs showed the machine to a local electronics equipment retailer, who ordered twenty-five. Jobs received marketing advice from a friend, who was a retired CEO from Intel, and he helped them with marketing strategies for selling their new product. Jobs and Wozniak had great inspiration in starting a computer company that would produce and sell computers. To start this company they sold their most valuable possessions. Jobs sold his Volkswagen micro-bus and Wozniak sold his Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator, which raised $1,300 to start their new company. With that capital base and credit begged from local electronics suppliers, they set up their first production line. Jobs encouraged Wozniak quit his job at Hewlett-Packard to become the vice president in charge of research and development of the new enterprise. And he did quit his job to become vice president. Jobs came up with the name of their new company Apple in memory of a happy summer he had spent as an orchard worker in Oregon.