I was looking back at the calendar for October
2011 recently, and it really struck me. It was
this bizarre, pivotal moment in tech history.
Oh, absolutely. It was one of those weeks where
the world really shifted, but half of the shift
was screamingly loud and the other half was almost
completely silent. It's a perfect study in contrast,
isn't it? Yeah. You're talking about the week
that digital age lost two of its founding fathers,
really. Exactly. But the way we handled it, the
way the world reacted was just so different.
On one side, you had Steve Jobs. When he died
on October 5th, it was a global event. A phenomenon.
A total phenomenon. I remember walking past the
Apple store downtown and the windows were just,
you know, plastered with sticky notes. People
were crying in the streets. It was front page
news in every single language. It felt like a
head of state had died. It really did. And in
a way, it made sense. Jobs was the face. Of the
technology we touch, the technology we hold,
he was the showman. The ultimate showman. He'd
hold the device up in his hand and tell us it
was magic. And we believed him. We felt this
personal connection to the guy in the black turtleneck
because he was the one selling us the future.
Then, just seven days later, literally a week
around October 12th, another man died. He was
70 years old, living alone in a town called Berkeley
Heights, New Jersey. His name was Dennis Ritchie.
crickets. Almost total silence. Unless you were
a serious computer nerd, a programmer, you probably
didn't even see the headline. It was buried.
It was there at all. And that silence, I think,
is actually quite profound. It speaks volumes
about the nature of his work. While Steve Jobs
was designing the, let's call them the fashion
items of the tech world, the beautiful, sleek
glass rectangles, Dennis Ritchie was doing something
much, much deeper. He wasn't designing the case.
He was designing the physics of the entire digital
universe that lives inside that case. That's
the core of what we want to get into today. This
claim that this quiet guy who nobody stopped
to mourn in the street actually built the, quote,
numeric soul of the device in your pocket right
now. It's not just a claim, you know, it's the
reality of the situation. If you could take a
powerful enough microscope and look inside the
logic of your iPhone or your smart fridge or
the massive servers running this very conversation.
You wouldn't see Steve Jobs. You would not. You
would see the work of Dennis Ritchie everywhere.
His fingerprints are on every single chip. So
if he's that fundamental, why is he the unsung
hero? Why don't we have movies about him written
by Aaron Sorkin? Why isn't he a household name?
Because infrastructure is invisible when it works
perfectly. You only notice the plumbing when
a pipe bursts. Right. You only think about the
power grid when the lights go out. Dennis Ritchie
built the plumbing for the entire information
age. So for this deep dive, we're going to unpack
that. We're going to figure out how one man,
working in a probably messy office at Bell Labs,
created the two most important, most foundational
tools in computing history. The Unix operating
system and the C programming language. The twin
pillars. Yeah, and I hear those names Unix and
CNOT, like I vaguely know they're important.
But I want to get past the Wikipedia summary
today. I really want to understand why they matter.
Because I've heard people, serious people, say
that without Richie, the internet as we know
it simply wouldn't exist. And that's not hyperbole.
It's a statement of fact. Brian Kernaghan, who
worked right alongside him, famously said that
the tools Ritchie built and their direct descendants
run pretty much everything today. Everything.
Everything. So our mission here is to find out
how that happened. And it really has to start
with understanding who Dennis Ritchie actually
was as a person. Right, because he wasn't a Silicon
Valley dropout, was he? He didn't start some
company in a garage with the goal of getting
rich. Oh, not at all. He was from a completely
different world, a different mindset. Dennis
McAllister Ritchie was born in 1941 in Bronxville,
New York. And he was basically born into the
family business of science and engineering. His
father was also in the field. His father, Alistair
Ritchie, was a legend in his own right. A longtime
scientist at Bell Labs. The same Bell Labs. The
very same. Alistair co -authored a really important
book called The Design of Switching Circuits.
Now, that sounds incredibly dry. It does sound
a little dry, yeah. But switching circuits are
the fundamental logic of how machines make decisions.
It's the physical manifestation of zero and one.
On and off. True and false. Dennis literally
grew up in Summit, New Jersey, with that kind
of deep structural thinking just floating around
the dinner table. So he was steeped in this idea
of logical structures from the time he was a
kid. It wasn't something he discovered in college.
Completely. It was his native language. And of
course, he was a brilliant student. He went to
Harvard, graduated in 1963. But here's the key
distinction. And this is so important for understanding
his later work. He didn't study computer science.
Because the major didn't exist yet. It barely
existed as a concept. He studied physics and
applied mathematics. And I think this is absolutely
crucial for understanding how his mind worked.
Well, computer science today can sometimes feel
more like engineering. You're gluing different
libraries and frameworks together to build a
product. But physics and pure math. They're about
discovering fundamental truths. They're about
finding the cleanest, the most elegant, the simplest
possible equation to describe a complex universe.
And you're saying you can see that elegance in
his code later on? You absolutely can. Yeah.
There is a minimalism and a power to his work
that is just beautiful. It's not messy. It's
incredibly disciplined. He approached software
not as a hacker trying to make something work
for a demo, but as a mathematician trying to
find the correct and most fundamental solution
to a problem. OK, so speaking of his time at
Harvard, there's this really weird story about
his Ph .D. that I was reading about. The notes
say he sort of lost his degree. How on earth
do you lose a Ph .D.? This is one of those anecdotes
that perfectly, perfectly encapsulates his personality.
So in 1968, he's at Harvard. He writes his entire
thesis. It's got this very academic title, Computational
Complexity and Program Structure. Sounds impressive.
It was. It was supervised by a big name. Patrick
Fisher. He does all the research. He writes the
draft. He submits it. He's done all the hard
work. But he never officially received the degree
at the time. So what happened? Did he fail his
defense or something? No, no, nothing like that.
He just he just didn't bother with the final
administrative wrap up. The story goes that he
didn't want to pay the binding fee to have a
fancy copy put in the library, or he just didn't
file the final piece of paperwork. He already
started working at Bell Labs, and he was so completely
engrossed in the actual real -world problems
there that the piece of paper, the credential
itself, it just didn't matter to him. that is
the ultimate nerd flex i'm literally too busy
inventing the future to go pick up my diploma
from the registrar's office it is and for decades
people thought the thesis was actually lost it
became this kind of biographical mystery a holy
grail then just a few years ago in 2020 the computer
history museum worked with his family and finally
dug it up from his home but it just shows you
where his head was at he wasn't chasing titles
or accolades he was chasing interesting problems
And he went to chase those problems at Bell Labs.
I feel like we need to pause on Bell Labs for
a second. We all hear the name. But in the 1960s,
what was this place really? Was it just a corporate
lab? It was Mecca. It was the absolute engine
room of American and really global innovation
for half a century. You have to imagine a place
that had the nearly unlimited funding of a massive
corporation, AT &T, but the intellectual freedom.
of a top -tier university. That's a rare combination.
Incredibly rare. You could walk down the hallway
and bump into a guy who had just won the Nobel
Prize for discovering the cosmic microwave background
radiation and then go have lunch with the team
that was inventing the laser. The transistor
was invented there. Information theory was born
there. It sounds like a playground for geniuses.
It was. And the management style was completely
unique. They basically hired the most brilliant
people they could find and said, go do something
interesting. We trust you. They didn't have these
quarterly product targets or marketing driven
deadlines in the same way companies do today.
And that freedom is the only reason Richie and
his colleagues were able to do what they did.
So he lands at Bell Labs and he meets Ken Thompson.
And this is the partnership that changes everything.
Lennon -McCartney of computing. Right. And they
start working on this project called Multics.
What was that? OK, so Multics. The name stands
for Multiplexed Information and Computing Service.
This was the Apollo program of computing in the
60s. A moonshot. It was this massive joint project
between Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric.
What was the goal? They wanted to build a computing
utility. The idea was that computing would be
like electricity or water. You just plug your
terminal into the wall, and this massive mainframe
somewhere else would serve up computing power
to hundreds of users at once. That sounds suspiciously
like the cloud or timesharing. It was a proto
-cloud. It was an incredibly visionary idea.
But the problem was they tried to do everything
at once. The system became monstrously, unbelievably
complex. It was slow. It cost a fortune to run.
It was a classic case of design by committee
on a grand scale. And Bell Labs, despite having
deep pockets, eventually got sick of burning
money on it. They pulled the plug. In 1969, they
officially withdrew from the Multics project.
They just realized it was a bottomless pit. So
suddenly, Richie and Ken Thompson, who had been
living in this world for years, were left. With
nothing, no project, no massive mainframe to
play with. This seems like the moment where most
people in a big company would just, you know,
dust themselves off and go find another corporate
assignment. OK, boss, tell me what to work on
next. But they didn't. They were frustrated.
They had tasted what an operating system could
be, something interactive, something that let
multiple people work at once. And they did not
want to go back to the old way of doing things.
And what was that old way? Remind us what they
were trying to avoid. The alternative was called
batch processing. And it was soul crushing. Imagine
you want to run a program. You can't just type
it. You have to punch your code onto a stack
of physical cards. Like with holes in them? Exactly.
A stack of punch cards. You take your stack of
cards to an operator, a guy in a white lab coat
behind a big glass wall. You hand them over.
He puts them in a queue with everyone else's
jobs. You come back six or eight hours later,
and he hands you a printout that says, error
on line three. That sounds like actual hell.
The feedback loop is hours long. It was an incredible
amount of friction. Multics, for all its flaws,
was supposed to be interactive. You type a command,
the computer responds instantly. So when Multics
was canceled, Thompson and Ritchie were desperate
to keep that interactive environment alive. And
Ken Thompson found an old, discarded computer
in a corner of the lab, a PDP -7. A discarded
computer, not the latest and greatest. Far from
it. It was already obsolete, sitting unused.
It was a mini -computer, which in 1969 meant
it was only the size of a few filing cabinets,
not an entire room. But it had terrible memory,
very little processing power. The key thing,
though, was that it was theirs. Nobody was watching
them. No management oversight. So they start
building their own operating system. Was it just
for fun? Was there a business case? Not at all.
It was for utility, born of necessity. Constance
had written this game he liked called Space Travel,
which simulated the physics of flying through
the solar system. Our video game. Basically,
yeah. And running it on the other available systems
was expensive and clunky. So he decided to port
the game to the little PDP -7. But to do that
effectively, the machine needed a basic operating
system, a file system. So Thompson starts writing
one and Ritchie joins in. They started stripping
away all the insane complexity of multics and
keeping only the clean, simple ideas. And this
is where the name comes from, right? This is
a great story. It is. Their colleague, Brian
Kernighan, who we mentioned earlier, joked that
since the bloated multics was multiplexed. meaning
many things at once. This new, scrappy, minimalist
system was the opposite. It was Uniplex. It did
one thing. Single tasking system. Right. So he
called it Unix, U -N -I -C -S, as a pun. And
that eventually got stylized as U -N -I -X. The
most important piece of software in the world
started as a dad joke. A nerd pun, yes. But the
name perfectly reflected the philosophy. And
this is where we really need to dig in. Because
the Unix philosophy is the idea that truly changed
the world. Multics tried to be a Swiss army knife
with a thousand blades that was so heavy you
couldn't lift it. Unix was a kitchen drawer full
of individual, really sharp knives. Okay, break
that analogy down for me. What does that mean
in practice? The Unix philosophy, in a nutshell,
is this. First, write programs that do one thing
and do it well. Second, write programs that can
work together. Third... write programs to handle
text streams because that is a universal interface.
Can you give me a real -world example of what
that looks like? Absolutely. Let's say you have
a huge text file, maybe a whole book, and you
want to find every unique word in that book that
contains the letter Z, sort them alphabetically,
and then count how many there are. Okay, a pretty
specific task. In the old way of thinking, you'd
have to write a single, massive, complex program
from scratch to do specifically that one task.
In the Unix way, you use small tools and connect
them with a concept called a pipe. You take a
small program that just reads text. You pipe
its output to another small program that just
finds words matching a pattern. You pipe that
output to a program that just sorts lines of
text. You pipe that to a program that removes
duplicates. And finally, you pipe that to a program
that just counts lines. It's like a digital assembly
line. Each station does one simple job. Precisely.
You chain these small, simple, single -purpose
tools together to accomplish a complex task.
This concept of the pipe, represented by a vertical
bar on the command line, was utterly revolutionary.
It meant you didn't have to reinvent the wheel
every time you had a new problem. You just rearranged
the Lego blocks you already had. And Richie's
role in this was what? He was crucial. While
Thompson wrote a lot of the initial kernel and
commands, Ritchie was deeply involved in the
design philosophy. And very importantly, he was
the primary designer of the Unix file system.
What was special about the file system? The big
idea was everything is a file. Your document
is a file, obviously. But in Unix, your keyboard
is also treated like a file. The screen you're
typing on is a file. The printer is a file. Even
the processes running on the system are represented
as files. This incredible abstraction made the
system unbelievably simple and flexible. You
could use the same tools to read from a document
as you did to read from the keyboard. Okay, so
they have this cool, elegant OS running on their
junker PDP -7 in a closet in New Jersey. But
that's a long way from running the entire world.
How does it escape the lab? That is the next
great revolution, porting. See, back then, if
you wrote software for a specific computer, like
a PDP -7, it only ran on a PDP -7. It was completely
locked to the hardware. The code was written
in what's called assembly language, which is
tied directly to the wiring and instruction set
of that specific machine. So if Bell Labs bought
a new, better computer a year later, all their
Unix work would be trash. Basically. You'd have
to start over and rewrite the whole thing from
scratch for the new machine's architecture. It
was a huge problem. Richie and Thompson did something
that was considered heretical at the time. They
decided they wanted to move Unix to a newer,
more powerful machine, the PDP -11. But to do
that effectively, they knew they needed a way
to write the operating system in a language that
wasn't tied to any one piece of hardware. And
this is the bridge to the next huge topic. They
needed a new language. Yes. This is the moment.
To make Unix universal. To make it so it could
live on any computer, past, present, or future.
Dennis Ritchie had to invent the C programming
language. All right. This is the part I've been
dreading a little bit because I'm not a coder.
I hear C and my brain just sees semicolons and
error messages. How do we explain the importance
of C to someone who has never written a line
of code? Let's stick with analogies. Yeah. We
talked about assembly language before. Imagine
you want to build a simple brick wall. Assembly
language is like giving instructions to a robot
where you have to specify the movement of every
single muscle fiber in its body. Contract bicep
by 20%. Rotate wrist exactly four degrees. Grip
brick with 10 .2 newtons of force. Extend arm.
That sounds absolutely exhausting. And if you
get one muscle twitch wrong, you drop the brick
and the whole thing fails. Precisely. And even
worse, if you get a new different model of robot,
none of those muscle instructions make any sense
anymore because the new robot has different arms
and motors. That's assembly. It's incredibly
fast and powerful if you get it right, but it's
tedious, error -prone, and completely tied to
one specific machine. So what's the opposite
of that? What's a high -level language? A high
-level language like Python or JavaScript today
is like telling a human contractor, build me
a four -foot -high brick wall right there. The
contractor handles all the details of muscles
and mortar. It's easy for you, the boss, to give
the instruction, but you lose fine -grained control.
Maybe the contractor builds it a bit slower than
you'd like or uses a bit too much mortar. It's
abstract and easy, but less efficient. Okay,
so we have the micromanaging robot and the independent
contractor. Where does C fit in this picture?
C is the perfect middle ground. It's like you,
the human, are wearing a powered exoskeleton.
You are still moving the bricks yourself. You
have all that direct control and speed and power,
but the suit handles the tedious micromuscle
movements for you. It lets you think in terms
of pick up brick and place brick, and it translates
those concepts into the machine's native instructions
with incredible efficiency. So it's powerful
and fast like the robot, but readable and logical
like a human instruction. That's the magic of
it. Richie created a language that was close
to the metal, as programmers say. It allowed
you to do things that were previously only possible
in assembly, like managing memory addresses directly,
which is risky but very powerful, while still
using logical words and structures that humans
can understand, like if, then, while, and for.
You mentioned memory addresses. Why is that so
important? I mean, today, I just save a file.
I don't have to think about where on the hard
drive it goes. In the 1970s, you absolutely had
to think about it. Memory was scarce and incredibly
expensive. A core innovation in C was the concept
of pointers. A pointer is basically just a variable
that holds a memory address. It allowed a programmer
to say, hey, don't copy this entire massive encyclopedia
from one part of memory to another new spot.
Instead, just create a little note that points
to the encyclopedia that's already on the shelf
over there. So it saved a ton of space and time.
A massive amount. It made programs incredibly
fast and efficient. But it also made them dangerous.
How so? Because if you're not careful, your pointer
could point to the wrong shelf. Or you could
change the data on the shelf when another part
of the program was still expecting the old data
to be there. Or you could forget to clean up
the shelf when you're done, leading to memory
leaks. This is the great trade -off of C5 -3.
Richie gave programmers a chainsaw. Yes. It's
an unbelievably powerful and efficient tool.
You can build a log cabin in record time. But
if you're careless for a split second, you can
cut your own leg off. Many modern languages have
safety guards on the chainsaw. C does not. It
assumes you're an expert and trusts you with
the full power of the machine. And this language,
C, was what allowed them to finally move Unix
off that one machine. This was the absolute game
changer. They rewrote almost the entire Unix
kernel and all its utilities in C. This was unheard
of. Operating systems were supposed to be written
in assembly. But by rewriting it in C, the operating
system was suddenly no longer a PDK -11 thing.
It was a software thing. It was abstract. So
if you wanted to run Unix on a brand new supercomputer
from a different company. You just had to do
one relatively small job. Write a C compiler
for that new machine. A C compiler is a program
that translates C code into that specific machine's
native language. Once you had that compiler,
the entire Unix operating system, millions of
lines of code, would just compile and run. This
broke the monopoly that hardware manufacturers
had on software. It completely destroyed it.
It decoupled the software from the hardware.
It meant the software was now portable, independent
of the machine it ran on. In a sense, it commoditized
the hardware. The value shifted from the box
to the code running inside it. This brings us
to the book. When I was preparing for this, I
was told I absolutely have to ask about K &R.
Ah, yes. The white book. The C Programming Language,
published in 1978, written by Brian Kernaghan
and Dennis Ritchie. In the industry to this day,
it is known simply as K &R. What is it, just
a textbook, a manual? It's so much more than
that. It is a masterpiece of technical writing.
Computer manuals then and now are like reading
a tax code. They are thick, dense, and impossible
to get through. K &R was thin. It was concise.
It was beautifully, clearly written. It didn't
just teach you the syntax of the language. It
taught you the style and the philosophy. It set
the vibe for the entire C programming community.
It absolutely did. It preached clarity over cleverness.
Simplicity. Don't write tricky code. Write clear
code. That book is still on the shelves of professional
software engineers today, almost 50 years later.
It's a classic for a reason. So now we have the
two pillars in place. We have the OS, Unix, and
the language C. Now let's fast forward. We need
to connect the dots. Why does the person listening
to this on an iPhone 16 or an Android phone owe
Dennis Ritchie a thank you? Okay, let's trace
the family tree. And it's actually shocking how
direct the lineage is. Let's start with Unix.
Richie himself said in an interview late in his
life that he views Linux as a direct and healthy
continuation of Unix ideas. And Linux today is
everywhere. Linux runs the Internet. The vast
majority of servers that make up the cloud, Amazon,
AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Azure, they all
run on Linux. So everything you stream a movie
on Netflix, do a Google search, use an AI chatbot,
you're using a system that is, for all intents
and purposes, a clone of Unix. What about the
phone in my pocket? Let's start with Android.
Android uses the Linux kernel. Hold on. Define
kernel for us. I hear that word all the time,
but what is it really? The kernel is the core.
It's the absolute heart of the operating system.
It's the first piece of software that loads when
the computer boots up. And it's the piece that
talks directly to the hardware. It manages the
CPU, the memory, the battery, the radios, the
interface you see, the buttons and icons you
click. That's like the body of the car. The kernel
is the engine. So Android's engine is Linux.
Which is a Unix clone. So every Android phone
is a Unix machine. Okay, what about Apple? Apple
is famous for being the odd one out. They always
like to do their own thing, the think different
mantra. Not here they don't. This is the ultimate
irony. Steve Jobs' greatest software achievement,
macOS and by extension iOS, which runs the iPhone
and iPad, is built directly on top of a system
called BSD. And BSD is? Berkeley Software Distribution.
And what is BSD? It's a version of Unix that
was developed at the University of California,
Berkeley in the 1970s, based on the original
source code from Bell Labs. So you're telling
me when I slide to unlock my iPhone deep, deep
down in the basement of that software? It's Dennis
Ritchie's logic. In fact, if you open the Terminal
app on any Mac today, you are dropped into a
Unix command line. You can type commands like
Ls to list files or grep to search for text,
the very same tools with the very same names
that Ritchie and Thompson designed on a PDP -11
in 1971. That is just wild. It's like finding
out that the engine in a brand new Tesla is actually
a steam engine from the 1800s, but, you know,
in a good way. It's more like finding out that
the laws of physics that govern the Tesla's electric
motor are the same ones Newton discovered 300
years ago. Ritchie didn't just invent a product.
He discovered and defined the fundamental physics
of how modern software should be structured.
And then there's the other side of it. The C
family tree. Right. Because C itself isn't really
used for writing most iPhone apps anymore, is
it? Programmers use newer languages like Swift.
You write the app in Swift, yes. But the Swift
compiler, the tool that takes your human -readable
Swift code and turns it into an app the iPhone
can actually run, is written in C++ Mark. And
what is C++? It's literally just C with a bunch
of extra features bolted on. It was originally
called C with glasses. So C is building the tools
that build the apps. It's the foundation of the
whole tool chain. What about Java, the language
that runs huge corporate systems and was the
original language for Android apps? Its syntax
is based directly on C JavaScript, the language
that makes the entire web interactive. C style
syntax. Python, the language of data science
and AI. The main Python interpreter, the program
that actually runs Python code, is written in
C. So it really is the DNA. It is the absolute
genetic ancestor. Every single major programming
language in use today is either a direct descendant
of C, is heavily influenced by C's syntax, or
is built using tools written in C. I remember
reading one commentator who said, Richie co -invented
the DNA of effectively every single computer
software product we use. I honestly thought that
was an exaggeration when I first read it. It's
not. It's probably an understatement. Yeah. Doug
McElroy, one of their brilliant colleagues at
Bell Labs, put it best. He said the names of
Ritchie and Thompson may safely be assumed be
attached to almost everything not otherwise attributed.
Meaning if you look at a piece of foundational
software and you don't know who built it, it
was probably them. That's the gist of it. Their
influence is the default. I want to pivot a bit
to the man himself, because usually when you
have someone this influential. Steve Jobs, Bill
Gates, and Elon Musk, they are these massive,
complicated, often difficult personalities. They
seek out the spotlight. They want the credit.
Dennis Ritchie seems different. He was the absolute
antithesis of the modern tech bro CEO. He was
quiet. He was famously humble. He lived alone.
He wasn't trying to disrupt industries or make
billions of dollars or become a celebrity. He
was a scientist. He just wanted to build better
tools for himself and his friends. There's this
story about the NSA that I think is just incredible.
It feels like it's pulled from a spy thriller
for a second. It really does. So in the 1970s,
Ritchie was also dabbling in cryptography, because
of course he was. He was working with two colleagues,
James Reeds and Robert Morris, on what's called
a ciphertext -only attack. Which means cracking
a secret code without having the decryption key,
right? Exactly. You just have the scramble messages.
And they were targeting the US M209 cipher machine.
This was a mechanical encryption device used
by the U .S. military during World War II and
the Korean War. It was supposed to be secure.
Well, Ritchie and his team wrote a program that
could crack it. They figured out that if they
had about 2 ,000, 2 ,500 letters of coded text,
they could solve it. That's a huge deal. They
basically proved a piece of U .S. military encryption
hardware was fundamentally broken. It was a massive
discovery. So they wrote a formal paper on it.
They were getting ready to publish it in an academic
journal. The NSA, the National Security Agency,
came knocking on Bell Labs' door. The actual
men in black. Pretty much. They came and they
had a quiet conversation with Ritchie and Bell
Labs management. And they said, look, we know
you cracked it. We're not surprised. But you
cannot publish this paper. And their reason was?
Their reason was that several foreign governments,
some of them adversaries of the United States,
were still using that same M209 machine because
they thought it was secure. The NSA was happily
reading their mail. If Ritchie published his
paper, these governments would find out their
codes were broken, they'd switch to a new system,
and a valuable source of intelligence would go
dark. Wow. Okay, so this is a real ethical dilemma.
This is the moment where the modern information
wants to be free. Hacktivists would just dump
the paper on the Internet anyway. Consequences
be damned. Right. You can imagine that happening
today. But what did Dennis Ritchie do? He just
said, okay, and he put the paper in a drawer.
And it stayed there, unpublished, for decades.
He didn't fight it? He didn't argue for academic
freedom? No. He just complied. He wasn't an anarchist.
He was a scientist. But he was also a pragmatist.
He didn't have this massive ego that needed the
fame of being the guy who beat the NSA. The intellectual
challenge was solved. That was enough for him.
So he just went back to work on Unix. That humility
seems to be the central theme of his life. He
wins the Turing Award in 1983, which is... The
Nobel Prize of Computing. The highest honor.
He gets the National Medal of Technology from
President Bill Clinton in 1998. The citation
says he stimulated the growth of an entire industry.
But he never really cashed in, did he? Never.
He stayed at Bell Labs, which later became Lucent
his entire career. He was managing a small research
group towards the end, but he was still writing
code. He wasn't on the board of directors. He
wasn't doing a book tour or giving TED Talks.
There's a visual description of him that I love
from his colleagues. He was often just seen walking
the halls in a simple striped sweater, sometimes
with a big beard, looking like a slightly distracted
but very calm professor. The calm genius archetype.
Exactly. And he was incredibly generous with
credit. Whenever people interviewed him about
Unix or C, he would constantly deflect the praise.
He'd insist that Unix was just a continuation
of ideas from Multics and other systems. He refused
to take sole credit. He always, always pointed
Ken Thompson to Brian Kernighan to the whole
collaborative environment of Bell Labs. Which
makes the end of his life and the lack of public
recognition even more poignant. We talked about
the timing, October 2011. Yeah, it was a rough
end. He had been in frail health for a while.
He was... battling prostate cancer and heart
disease. He died alone in his home. The news
actually broke because Rob Pike, another former
colleague and a giant in the field himself, posted
about it on Google Plus Skip. Google Plus Skip.
Wow, that dates it right there. It really does.
And because the entire global media machine was
in the middle of this week -long deification
of Steve Jobs, the obituaries for Richie were
small. They were footnotes. But the tech community,
the people who actually build things, they knew.
Oh, they knew. The tributes from that community
were quiet, but so heartfelt. And they were geeky
and beautiful. The Fedora 16 Linux distribution,
which was released a month after he died, was
officially dedicated to his memory. FreeBSD 9
.0, another major open source operating system,
was also dedicated to him. And my personal favorite
tribute. The asteroid, yes. In 2012, astronomers
Tom Glenos and David H. Levy officially named
asteroid 294727 Dennis Ritchie. So he's literally
floating out there in the cosmos. His legacy
is in the sky and in the cloud that runs on his
OS and in the phone in your pocket. He's everywhere.
I want to circle all the way back to that comparison
we started with, Jobs versus Richie. Now that
we've gone through this whole history, how do
you see it? It feels like we need both types
of people, but our culture over -indexes so heavily
on one of them. That is the perfect way to put
it. We over -index on the visionary marketer.
And Steve Jobs was a genius at that. Let's not
take anything away from him. He understood human
psychology. He understood desire. He knew how
to package technology into a beautiful, simple
object that we would fall in love with. He was
a master of the user experience. But Ritchie
was the visionary architect. He understood the
structural integrity of the entire digital world.
The Economist had that great line in his obituary.
The gizmos of the digital age owe a part of their
numeric souls to Dennis Ritchie. And the Deccan
Herald, a newspaper in India, went even further.
They just flat out said Ritchie was far more
influential than Jobs. And you can make a strong
case for that. What's the case? Here's the litmus
test I always use. If Steve Jobs had never existed,
your smartphone today would almost certainly
look different. Maybe you'd have a physical keyboard.
Maybe the interface wouldn't be as slick. But
it would very likely still exist in some form.
Another company would have figured it out. But
if Dennis Ritchie had never existed... We might
still be punching cards. It's a real possibility.
Or, more likely, we would be stuck in a horribly
fragmented world of proprietary, incompatible
systems where nothing talks to anything else.
The internet as we know it, which relies on open
standards and portable software that can run
on any machine, might have been impossible. Richie
gave us the universal language and the universal
blueprint. It really makes me think about where
we are today in the tech world. Richie and his
colleagues worked in this open, collaborative
environment. Bell Labs shared the Unix source
code with universities. For free, basically.
They wanted people to play with it, to learn
from it, to improve it. It was an academic project,
not a commercial one. Exactly. And now you look
at our phones. They are the definition of walled
gardens. They have locked bootloaders. They have
app stores that you cannot bypass. The hardware
is sealed shut. That is the big, final, provocative
question for you, the listener, to think about.
We built this entire modern world on the back
of Richie's open, modular, tool -based philosophy.
But the dominant companies of today are increasingly
locking that world down into closed proprietary
ecosystems. Are we still funding the kind of
fundamental curiosity -driven research that allows
a Dennis Ritchie to play with a junker PDP -7
for a year with no immediate commercial goal?
Or are we just funding the next iteration of
the shiny fashion item? Exactly. Are we building
foundational tools for the future, or are we
just building disposable products for today?
Richie built tools, and tools are what empower
the next generation to build something that we
can't even imagine yet. That's a heavy, important
thought to end on. I can guarantee that the next
time I pick up my phone, I'm not going to see
the screen and the apps. I'm going to be thinking
about the engine underneath it all. Think about
the Unix philosophy. Think about the C code running
the kernel. Think about the quiet guy in the
striped sweater. Think about Dennis. Thanks so
much for taking us through this deep dive. It's
always a pleasure. His is a story that needs
to be told.