The genius of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

By -
How many pieces of technology developed 45 years ago are now more popular than ever?

I thought about this while running some UNIX shell commands in Linux (based on UNIX), which I am running as a alternate operating system on my Chromebook to ChromeOS (based on UNIX). So I picked up my iPhone running iOS (based on UNIX) to write this post, which I will put on Facebook, which runs on UNIX-based servers. Some of my friends will read my post on their Android phones, which run an operating system based on UNIX. Others will read it on their Macintosh computers, which run an operating system... based on UNIX.

And the really amazing thing here is that the work of Thompson and Ritchie endured several decades of ridicule before becoming the most ubiquitous piece of software in the world. And the reason for its success is intimately connected to their humility: instead of believing that they knew everything a user would want and building it into a monolithic operating system, they built a minimal framework within which it was very easy to add your own tools. They crowd-sourced the development of their operating system well before anyone had invented that term.

Comments

  1. Samson Corwell5:13 PM

    What were they ridiculed for?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah6:09 PM

      People didn't really cool them, but UNIX itself. It had too few built-in features, was too hard to get the hang of, was just for nerds. Largely the very things that ultimately led to its triumph. ("Hard to use" really translated to "easy for programmers to use," which ultimately led to those programmers building smooth, simple user interfaces over the UNIX core.)

      Delete
  2. Samson Corwell1:58 PM

    Well, what about Windows? That's the most common desktop operating system and it's not UNIX-like.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah3:16 PM

      What about it, Samson? Did I claim Windows did not exist or something, or that UNIX is the only OS in the world?

      Delete
    2. gcallah3:21 PM

      Or maybe you are saying that Windows is a more widely used OS than UNIX-like OSes? If so, you might look up the facts before posting: Android users ALONE vastly outnumber Windows users.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more