“Dennis Ritchie: The shoulders Steve Jobs stood on”

After Steve Jobs’ death in October 2011, the waves of tributes celebrating Steve Jobs’ life and achievements swept through the shores of the web for days and days. In fact, the waves didn’t come to the shore. It was ocean that came ashore. And it was all but natural. Steve had a profound impact on our digital lives that very few other individuals did. He changed the way we live and work.

While browsing through many tributes and reminiscing a genius, I came across an article on CNN titled, “Dennis Ritchie: The shouldersSteve Jobs stood on.” My first impression was that Dennis Ritchie paid tributes to Steve Jobs in an article on CNN. Somehow the name Dennis Ritchie sounded familiar, but I couldn’t associate his name. My curiosity got better of me and I clicked on the article. I saw a photo on the CNN article. It showed two gentlemen in the data center surrounded by an old keyboard style terminal and rim of computer tapes. I didn’t recognize the individuals on the photo. I had never seen them before, but the caption mentioned Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. I began to glance at the few more lines and saw words such as Bell Labs, C programming language and UNIX operating system.

I immediately realized who Dennis Ritchie was. I immediately recognized Ken Thompson. Dennis Ritchie was the father of the C programming language. Ken Thomson, a fellow researcher at Bell Labs, used C to build UNIX operating system.

And the article I was reading was a eulogy to Dennis Ritchie who had passed away in the same month as Steve Jobs.

My memories of Dennis Ritchie go back to my college days when I was learning computer programming. I already had a good grasp on Assembly, Basic, FORTRAN and Pascal languages. The next frontier for me was to get a good handle on C programming language. C was the language every computer programmer wanted to learn and master. There were plenty of job openings for C programmers. No wonder I also wanted to master C.

Unfortunately, C programming language course wasn’t offered at my school. My only option was to learn C language myself. My professor allowed me to borrow a book by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan called C Programming Language. The book was a classic. I was hooked onto it. I read this book word-by-word, page-by-page and chapter-by-chapter. I didn’t skip a single line. I learned C programming, and more importantly the computer programming, through this book. This book is a true classic. Concise but the definitive resource on C. When I came to USA to pursue Masters in Computer Science, the first book that I bought at Barnes and Noble in New York was this book. I wanted this book as a reference since I didn’t get time to buy this book in India before I flew to the USA.

My first job in the USA was as C programmer. It was my fluency in C that landed me my first job during a difficult job market in the USA. I had learned C so well just by reading the book that Dennis Ritchie wrote. It was my fluency in C language that accorded me better job options and work later in my career.

Dennis Ritchie’s legacy goes far beyond. In a eulogy, Rob Pike, a researcher at Bell Labs, writes, "Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much the entire Internet runs on -- is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C. It's really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did. Jobs was the king of the visible, and Ritchie is the king of what is largely invisible.”

 
Computing world is indebted to Dennis Ritchie. May his legacy live forever!

Watson, what were you thinking?

I am appalled at your answer in the final Jeopardy on Tuesday evening. You needed to name a US city that had two airports. I know you could produce such a list in nanosecond. You needed to further narrow it down by a war hero. You might have needed few extra microseconds, but that wasn't difficult. But you screwed up. You know and I know that there are only handful of US cities with two airports.

For God's sake, you were being ably supported by an army of 90 IBM Power750 series servers running AIX operating system. Each Power750 server had four Power7 processor chips, each with eight cores. That comes to 2,880 Power7 cores. It is equivalent to 2,880 powerful computer running in parallel. Each core was running at a speed of 3.5 Ghz. You had 16 Terabytes of memory. IBM had spent millions and millions on the design of your brain known as DeepQA software. It was a sheer exhibition of astounding computing power in front of the whole world. You should have aced this question. How could you screw this up?

Had Toronto been a city within any other part of the world than our neighbor Canada, our country would have been accused of violating geographic border of a sovereign nation. CIA might have been accused of conspiring and instigating a revolt in Toronto, Ontario. President Obama would have received a phone call from a foreign leader asking for a formal apology on your behalf. It could have started a war of words among politicians and foreign officials. What were you thinking? Toronto a US city?

Someone feared that your gaffe was a result of a hack attempt against our intellectual icon. Someone feared that hackers from Russia or China were just having fun. But not a chance. Your algorithms have been guarded dearly by IBM. We can't blame it on hacking. Admit it, it was a giant mistake.

I am afraid you will be a butt of joke for years to come like Dan Quale once was for his infamous gaffe. I don't think you are capable of comprehending sarcasm, but I can't resist the temptation of misspelling Dan's last name. Jay Leno, David Letterman and other stand-up comedians are going to have field days for years to come. SNL would have skits just based on your giant mistake. Even Alex Trebek couldn't resist mentioning your gaffe in his opening remarks on Wednesday. You have inspired thousands of bloggers, like me, to pen about your achievements and your mistakes.

You have inspired and given birth to a new expression "I am just a silicon!" This expression sounds very similar to "I am only human! Correct? We use this expression quite often. You better start using "I am just a silicon!" to condone and rationalize your mistakes. Like we are error-prone and susceptible to mistakes, you are equally error-prone and susceptible to the blunders. You are bound to commit blunders, but don't be ashamed because "You are just a silicon!" We are even.

Your stumble is of enormous proportion with potential to cause irreparable damage to the reputation of your descendants, but I think you will be OK. You know that humans  have bad memory, very bad memory. Our brain occupies very small area. It doesn't need a building like your brain does. You had 16 Terabytes of memory in our brain. We don't even know how much memory we have in our brain and we suffer from disease like amnesia. We forget things very easily. We hear tons of promises from political leaders every day, but we simply forget them the very next day. We are hoping you would help expose those leaders who don't deliver on those lofty and rosy promises. At least, this is your punishment for your gaffe on the national stage - remind us of broken promises.

I don't know why IBM didn't conceive you like a human. You don't have a face and a body. You are simply a flat screen. On Wednesday, Ken was trying to embrace you and congratulate you on your triumph against humans. I don't think that was his intention. He was just trying to read the label off of your flat screen to make sure that it was not "Made in China." All our flat screen TVs are made in China.

I am glad that you don't have a face. Otherwise Ken or Brad would have simply knocked you down. You might have noticed that Ken was desperate to question answers, but you were a lot faster. We humans do engage in extra-curricular activities including violence. If you want to see how we knock down our competitors, just watch few NHL games. I am so sad we won't have a chance to get in your face and complain. You are the smartest kid on the block. You are going to make us feel inferior, but we can't punch you in your belly. World is not fair.

Do you know that IBM had managed to bestow upon you all the advantages, and I might add unfair, so that you would win the Jeopardy championship? Ken and Brad had only brain each. You had 2,880 brains! IBM would have added more brains in a heartbeat if IBM thought you could have been defeated. Jeopardy didn't allow Ken and Brad to team up. Otherwise, they could have defeated you on Wednesday.

You also had a significant advantage, and unfair, with your buzzer. You were relying on an pneumatic buzzer. Ken and Brad were relying on their hands to press a buzzer. Hands, being a mechanical device, operate at a considerably lesser speed than your circuit. You may not be the smartest. You should have buzzed in your questions like Brad and Ken did. I know my fellow humans are very smart. They had their answers at the same nanosecond that you had yours. They simply couldn't buzz their answers in as fast as you were able to. You had an advantage. I thought machines were not capable of cheating, but you did. You will do well in this human world.

You almost ruined the most promising career for yourself one could ever imagine in his or her wildest ream. But I think you will be fine. You were just amazing. I don't have words to describe your achievements. What we have seen on Jeopardy is an evolution and a revolution. You put on a great show on earth. Your future is as bright and huge as this universe.