Tech World Mourns Loss of Dennis Ritchie, Father of C and Unix

Dennis Ritchie, the computer scientist responsible for C and Unix, has passed away at age 70. His career leaves behind an operating system and programming language that form the basis of some of the world's most widely used technologies. "You've got all these operating systems, languages and programs all building on Dennis' work," Pike concluded. "It's hard to think of a bigger legacy."

Legendary computer scientist and creator of the C programming language Dennis Ritchie has died at the age of 70, leaving behind a legacy that touches virtually every aspect of modern life.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (center) being awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Bill Clinton.

                                                                       
"Dennis was well-loved by his colleagues at Bell Labs and will be greatly missed," wrote Jeong Kim, president of Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) Bell Labs, in a statement on Thursday. Ritchie was employed at Bell Labs from 1967 to 2007, though he continued afterward in a consulting role.

Calling Ritchie "one of the most respected researchers from Bell Labs," Kim went on to list many of the scientist's key accomplishments, including not just the creation of C and coinvention of the Unix operating system with colleague Ken Thompson, but also the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems as well.

Ritchie was awarded the 2011 Japan Prize in May, adding to a long list of other awards, including also the Association for Computing Machinery Turing Award in 1983 and the U.S. Medal of Technology in 1999.

Confirmation of the exact date of Ritchie's death was not available at press time. He had reportedly been ill for some time.


'It's Hard to Think of a Bigger Legacy'

News of Ritchie's death was apparently first revealed to the world on Google+ by Rob Pike, a distinguished engineer at Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) who worked with Ritchie on numerous occasions.

"It's pretty amazing how much of an influence [Ritchie] had," Pike told TechNewsWorld. "[Steve] Jobs died last week, which was also very sad, but I think Dennis in some ways had a bigger effect on things. All those great things Jobs and his company built were based on C and things derived from C."

The Internet, too, "is basically a C shop," Pike noted. "The Linux machines that are the bedrock of the Web and other Unix variants are all written in C; browsers are all written in C or C++; Apache is written in C.

"You've got all these operating systems, languages and programs all building on Dennis' work," Pike concluded. "It's hard to think of a bigger legacy."

'People Are Still Building on It'

Indeed, "so many of the things we use today are basically programs that are written in C or languages that derived from it," agreed Brian Kernighan, professor in the department of computer science at Princeton University and coauthor with Ritchie on the classic programming tome, The C Programming Language.

Operating systems, the Internet and even the phone system are "all basically building on things that Dennis did," Kernighan told TechNewsWorld. "It's sort of invisible until you start to think about it."

In some ways "it's probably surprising that the work that was done 40 some years ago is still so central and critically important, and that people are still using and building on it," Kernighan added. At the same time, "I think it's going to stay that way for some while."

'Impossible to Overstate the Importance'

It"s "impossible to overstate the importance of the C programming language," agreed Randal Bryant, dean and university professor with the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Today, "C, and its successor C++, are the two most important languages for writing programs that require high performance and close control over memory resources," Bryant told TechNewsWorld. "Most of the world's code for managing computers and networks and for processing database transactions is written in either C or C++.

"Compilers can generate machine code from C and C++ programs that is as good or better than hand-crafted assembly code," Bryant added. "In addition, C has had strong influence on more recent languages, including Java."

'A Unique Invention That Showed Real Genius'

Avi Rubin, professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, is one of the many who cut their proverbial programming "teeth" on Kernighan and Ritchie's book, and he expressed similar awe at the impact of Ritchie's work.

"Steve Jobs was such a high-profile person, but I'm a little sad that only the computer people are going to be aware of what we've lost now," Rubin told TechNewsWorld.

"He was the father of Unix, which is the core of Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) operating system," Rubin explained. "Without what he did, the Internet wouldn't be what it is today, servers and high-performance computing wouldn't be possible."

Furthermore, the C language "didn't have anything to model itself after -- it was a unique invention that showed real genius," Rubin pointed out. "Probably more code was written in the last 25 years in C than in any other programming language."

In short, he concluded, Ritchie was "one of key people to getting the world to where it is today."

'People Need to Know Who He Was'

Ritchie's work may be taken for granted by many, but there's been an outpouring of reaction to his death from those in the technology community.

"Dennis Ritchie was the engineer/architect whose chapel ceiling Steve Jobs painted," wrote Linux fan @cmastication on Twitter, for example.
Elsewhere, an obituary put similar sentiments into programming syntax.
Pike said he's been impressed by the strength of the tech community's response.
"He's not a household name," Pike said, "but I really think people need to know who he was."

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Steve Job's Top 10 Quotations to Live an Extraordinary Life!!!

We feel ourselves so unfortunate to write Steve Jobs “Late” but being tech journalists we have to fulfill our duties. So we say with deep sorrow that the legend is no more among us. Steve Jobs, former  CEO and co-founder of Apple, an iconic character , a hero of tech zones, a great spring of inspiration for young generation and a matchless  personality  of tech world have passed away…. and this happened within the release of  Apple’s  iPhone 4S. It was first time that Apple launched its iPhone in a media event without Steve Jobs’ keynote.

Steve Jobs’ was not only famous as a CEO of Apple like big tech giant but he was also loved by  millions of folks due to his “Absolutely Convincing”  & “Amazingly  Fresh” quotations which he used to deliver in his keynotes at different events. People especially like his “Mind Blowing Communication Skills” and used to count days for his next speech.

Here is a collection of Steve Jobs (Late) Top 10 quotation those inspired million of minds  worldwide.

1. “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”

This very simple but remarkably powerful quote is taken from Steve Jobs address back in 2005 at Stanford commencement. These simple 04 diamond words acquire a mine of meanings for which we should have to use 4000 words.

2. “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and everyone should be really excellent. Because this is our life.”

3. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

4. “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the 4.

5.“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

6. “Design is not just what it looks like, design is how it works.”

7. “I’m convinced that half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance”

8. “you can’t ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

9. “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and everyone should be really excellent. Because this is our life.”

10. “Being the richest men in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me”.


These top 10 quotations of a visionary legend “Steve Jobs” direct you and guide you to the way of immeasurable success and unmatchable pride.


STEVE JOBS! YOU HAVE PHYSICALLY DIED BUT YOU MENTALY LIVE IN OUR MINDS!..

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Steve Jobs Authorized Biography to Debut on October 24!

We know the folks are much sad on the death of their beloved Steve Jobs- former CEO & co-founder of Apple. Also, they want to know each and every detail about Jobs’ life and persona. So Simon and Schuster decided to make an early release of their much anticipated Steve Job’s authorized biography written by a famous journalist Walter Isaacson, as reported by AllThingD. The book will now be released on 24th October instead of 21st November as announced earlier.

                                                                                   

Notably, this biographical book has been fully authorized by Steve Jobs himself. The book is consisting of more than 40 interviews with Steve Jobs and over 100 interviews with Job’s family members, friends and colleagues.

Apple fans were already waiting for this book with keen interest, but the massive increase in its demand has been noted since yesterday due to unfortunate incident of Steve Jobs death. Now the Steve Job’s Authorized Biography has been registered as 1 Bestselling book at Amazon with 40,000% increase in its selling gain.

Sources describe that the book was under the process of final touches alongside its updating to incorporate Job’s resignation as Apple’s CEO. The WSJ describes that Isaacson last interviewed Jobs four weeks ago, at which time nobody knew that Jobs would soon pass away from the world. It seems that Jobs’ last interview would be now the last chapter of his authorized biography.

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Ananth pai : Creator of Indian comics

Anant Pai (17 September 1929 – 24 February 2011), popularly known as Uncle Pai, was an Indian educationalist and creator of Indian comics, in particular the Amar Chitra Katha series in 1967, along with the India Book House publishers, and which retold traditional Indian folk tales, mythological stories, and biographies of historical characters. In 1980, he launched Tinkle, a children's anthology, which was started under Rang Rekha Features, India's first comic and cartoon syndicate, that lasted till 1998, with him as the Managing Director.
Today, Amar Chitra Katha, sells about three million comic books a year, in English and more than 20 Indian languages, and has sold about 100 million copies since its inception in 1967 by Anant Pai, and in 2007 was taken over by ACK Media.

Awards and recognitions:

• Lifetime Achievement Award - at the First Indian Comic Convention, New Delhi on 19 Feb 2011 (6 days before his death) was given by Pran, Creator of Chacha Chaudhury.
• Karpoorchand Puraskar of Uttar Pradesh Bal Kalyan Sansthan (1994)
• Yudhvir Memorial Award in Hyderabad (1996)
• Maharashtra Rajya Hindi Sahitya Academy Award (1996)
• Dr. T. M. A. Pai Memorial Award in Manipal (1997)
• University of Bombay Department of Chemical Technology's Distinguished Alumnus Award (1999)
• Millennium Konkani Sammelan Award, Illinois, U.S.A (2000)
• Raja Rammohan Roy Library Foundation's Award (2001)
• Priyadarshni Academy Award (2002)
• Vishwa Saraswat Sammaan (2003)

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Larry Page: The Co-Founder of Google

Lawrence "Larry" Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, with Sergey Brin, is best known as the co-founder of Google. As of April 4, 2011, he is also the Chief Executive Officer of Google, as announced on January 20, 2011. As of 2011, his personal wealth is estimated to be $19.8 billion.

Early Life and Education:

Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan. His father, Carl Page, earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 1965 when the field was in its infancy, and is considered a "pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence." Both he and Page's mother were computer science professors at Michigan State University. Page is Jewish on his mother's side, and was raised without religion.
Page attended the Okemos Montessori School (now called Montessori Radmoor) in Okemos, Michigan from 1975 to 1979, and graduated from East Lansing High School in 1991. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree in computer science from Stanford University. While at the University of Michigan, "Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks" (actually a line plotter), served as the president of the Eta Kappa Nu in Fall 1994, and was a member of the 1993 "Maize & Blue" University of Michigan Solar team.
During an interview, Page recalled his childhood, noting that his house "was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place." His attraction to computers started when he was six years old when he got to "play with the stuff lying around." He became the "first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment from a word processor." His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking "everything in his house apart to see how it worked." He said that "from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology...and business . . . probably from when I was 12, I knew I was going to start a company eventually."
After enrolling for a Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, Larry Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pursue this idea, which Page later recalled as "the best advice I ever got". Page then focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[15] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student.
John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, wrote of Page that he had reasoned that the "entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation – after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could devise a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it 'the Web would become a more valuable place'." Battelle further described how Page and Brin began working together on the project:
"At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.
"The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry."
Brin and Page originally met in March 1995, during a spring orientation of new computer Ph.D. candidates. Brin, who had already been in the program for two years, was assigned to show some students, including Page, around campus, and they later became good friends.
To convert the backlink data gathered by BackRub's web crawler into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones. It relied on a new kind of technology that analyzed the relevance of the back links that connected one Web page to another. In August 1996, the initial version of Google was made available, still on the Stanford University Web site.
Bussiness:
In 1998, Brin and Page founded Google, Inc. Page ran Google as co-president along with Brin until 2001 when they hired Eric Schmidt as Chairman and CEO of Google. In January 2011 Google announced that Page would replace Schmidt as CEO in April the same year. Both Page and Brin earn an annual compensation of one dollar. On April 4, 2011, Page officially became the chief executive officer of Google, while Schmidt stepped down to become executive chairman.
Awards and recognition:

PC Magazine has praised Google as among the Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines (1998) and awarded Google the Technical Excellence Award, for Innovation in Web Application Development in 1999. In 2000, Google earned a Webby Award, a People's Voice Award for technical achievement, and in 2001, was awarded Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature at the Search Engine Watch Awards."
In 2002, Page, along with Sergey Brin, was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100, as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
In 2003, both Brin and Page received an honorary MBA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses...." And in 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering," and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. "In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." They joined a "select cadre of 32 of the world's most influential communications technology pioneers...." He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004. In 2005, Brin and Page were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2002 the World Economic Forum named Page a Global Leader for Tomorrow and in 2004 the X PRIZE chose Page as a trustee for their board.
In 2004, Page and Brin were named "Persons of the Week" by ABC World News Tonight. Page received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2009 during graduation commencement ceremonies.
In 2011, he was ranked 24th on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires and as the 11th richest person in the United States.

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Albert von Szent-Györgyi: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1937

Biography:

Albert von Szent-Györgyi was born in Budapest on September 16, 1893, the son of Nicolaus von Szent-Györgyi, a great landed proprietor and Josefine, whose father, Joseph Lenhossék, and brother Michael were both Professors of Anatomy in the University of Budapest. He matriculated in 1911 and entered his uncle's laboratory where he studied until the outbreak of World War I when he was mobilized. He served on the Italian and Russian fronts, gaining the Silver Medal for Valour, and he was discharged in 1917 after being wounded in action. He completed his studies in Budapest and then worked successively with the pharmacologist, G. Mansfeld at Pozsony, with Armin von Tschermak at Prague, where he studied electrophysiology, and with L. Michaelis in Berlin, before he went to Hamburg for a two-year course in physical chemistry at the Institute for Tropical Hygiene.


In 1920 he became an assistant at the University Institute of Pharmocology in Leiden and from 1922 to 1926 he worked with H. J. Hamburger at the Physiology Institute, Groningen, The Netherlands. In 1927 he went to Cambridge as a Rockefeller Fellow, working under F. G. Hopkins, and spent one year at the Mayo Foundation, Rochester, Minnesota, before returning to Cambridge. In 1930 he obtained the Chair of Medical Chemistry at the University of Szeged and in 1935 he also took the Chair in Organic Chemistry. At the end of World War II, he took the Chair of Medical Chemistry at Budapest and in 1947 he left Hungary to settle in the United States where he is Director of Research, Institute of Muscle Research, Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Szent-Györgyi's early researches at Groningen concerned the chemistry of cell respiration. He described the interdependence of oxygen and hydrogen activation and made his first observations on co-dehydrases and the polyphenol oxidase systems of plants. He also demonstrated the existence of a reducing substance in plant and animal tissues. At Cambridge and during his early spell in the United States, he isolated from adrenals this reducing substance, which is now known as ascorbic acid. Returning to Cambridge in 1929, he later described the pharmacological activity of the nucleotides with Drury.

On his return to Hungary, he noted the anti-scorbutic activity of ascorbic acid and discovered that paprika (capsicum annuum) was a rich source of vitamin C. His persistent studies of biological oxidation led to the recognition of the catalytic function of the C4-dicarboxylic acids, the discovery of «cytoflav» (flavin) and a recognition of the biological activity and probable vitamin nature of flavanone (vitamin P).

In 1938 he commenced work on muscle research and quickly discovered the proteins actin and myosin and their complex. This led to a reproduction of the fundamental reaction of muscle contraction which formed the foundation of muscle research in the following decades. The preservation of biological material in glycerine, which has had extensive application including agricultural use in the preservation of sperm, has resulted from his more recent work. He has also developed the use of rabbit psoas muscle as an experimental material, published theories on the problems of energetics and investigated the regulation of growth and cell membrane potential, and the hormonal function of the thymus gland.

Szent-Györgyi, a member of many scientifc societies, is a Past President of the Academy of Sciences, Budapest, and a Vice-President of the National Academy, Budapest. He was Visiting Professor, Harvard University in 1936 and Franchi Professor, University of Liège, 1938. He received the Cameron Prize (Edinburgh) in 1946 and the Lasker Award in 1954. His many publications include Oxidation, Fermentation, Vitamins, Health and Disease (1939); Muscular Contraction (1947); The Nature of Life (1947); Contraction in Body and Heart Muscle (1953); and Bioenergetics (1957).

Szent-Györgyi married Cornelia Demény, daughter of the Hungarian Postmaster-General, in 1917. During the 1930's he was actively anti-Nazi and during World War II he became a Swedish citizen - he was given extensive help by the Swedish Embassy in Budapest. In 1941, he married Màrta Borbiro, a co-worker at Woods Hole: they have one daughter.

He is interested in sport of all kinds, his favourites being sailing and alpinism.

From Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1922-1941, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1965

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.


Albert Szent-Györgyi died on October 22, 1986.

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